“The Long Sleep” by Diana Fenves | Issue 11 "Snake Eyes" Vault Story
This story is from Issue 11: “Snake Eyes” and is a particular favorite of ours. Read on, and you’ll learn why…
October
Hugo’s mom said goodbye to him in the Waffle House parking lot with a long, hard hug and a wet kiss on his cheek. She’d been crying, which always made Hugo ache inside. He smiled his widest, most adorable smile to comfort her, but it only made her sob harder. Her eyes teared up so much her nose ran, and she rubbed it with the back of her hand with a lack of dignity that was unusual for her.
“I’ve got to go, baby.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
He squared his shoulders like he’d seen his older cousin do, to show that he could be strong and sturdy even if he was only 9. Still, 9 wasn’t so little. His mom let him cook dinner sometimes now, like just-add-water mac n’ cheese, and salads with the food they got from the community garden down the street by the small icky pond he called “Mosquito Lake.” He wasn’t allowed to chop veggies without her supervision, but he could use the airgrill and the flip-pot to make soups and hot drinks. Winter was Hugo’s favorite time, when the Durham sky finally lost its humid flush and the scary trees bordering their neighborhood got thin and near see-through. They usually spent the season drinking hot chocolate out of worn old mugs, their handles worn and familiar. Hugo got to sleep late; his mom relaxed in the dark hours of the morning.
This winter, he knew, would be different. Mom got another job, which meant more money, which was a good thing. But he couldn’t come with her. He didn’t like the idea, his mom being somewhere he couldn’t picture. He liked being able to hold an image in his mind. His mom showed him pictures of the Center where she’d be—not far, just a few hours into the mountains, out near Asheville. She splurged, using up a lot of their data on a 3D projection of where she’d be working. She showed him the bright walls of the Center and the faces of all the smiling kids.
She’d be in training through the end of the fall, then come winter she’d take care of children while their parents took the long sleep through the cold months and woke up like fairy tale creatures at the end of the season, skin smooth and radiant for spring. Hugo hated those children with their shining faces and nice clothes. Just because they couldn’t be with their mothers, did they have to take his? He asked at first if he could blend in among them. His mom shook her head sadly. He didn’t ask why because he knew why. The children in the photos were mostly pale and freckled, not like Hugo’s caramel complexion, a few shades darker than his mom’s pale olive.
“What if I’m real quiet?”
He’d gotten in trouble the last year in school for being a know-it-all and yelling answers at the prompter out of turn. Once, he tipped his desk over, hating how he was too grown-up for the little ramshackle table and chair. It dug into the tops of his thighs and cut into his back, keeping him rooted where he didn’t want to be while the teacher’s voice came out from the screens and speakers, always too slow and boring for Hugo’s taste. But he could change. If he could go to the mountains, he would.
His mom had explained a dozen times why he couldn’t go, until eventually Hugo stopped asking, because he noticed how her body sagged when she answered him, like it was collapsing in on itself.
They’d planned to send him to Aunt Sarah’s in Raleigh, but she’d gotten a step up, too. Her bosses’ superiors were taking the long sleep, so just like that everyone would be moving on up the line. She couldn’t look after him, since she’d be moving to a nice corporate apartment that didn’t allow pets or dependents for employees with less than five years seniority. Hugo was secretly relieved. Aunt Sarah made him watch cartoons on an old 2D display, insisting more advanced technology would rot his brain. She seemed determined to get him interested in old moldy paperbacks with peeled faces and sad black-and-white insides. Plus, she snored real loud, and he didn’t like her girlfriend who kept plying him with sticky candies that got stuck in his teeth.
Instead, his mother wrapped him up in more layers than were strictly necessary, including a humiliating hat with a large poofy ball on top, and drove him to his father’s.
Hugo kept a picture of his dad in his head. A tall skinny man named Muhammad who lived in West Durham, where Hugo had once seen fancy cows on a school field trip. As a result, Hugo’s inner-picture always showed his father surrounded by the fat, fuzzy, brown-and-white tufted animals. Sometimes he liked to add a cowboy hat and place his father on the back of one of the big beasts, his hands around a saddle horn. Hugo had been a fan of cowboys until he learned about astronauts, which were infinitely better, even if they didn’t have animals.
Hugo sweated the whole drive over, as it couldn’t have been colder than 60 degrees Fahrenheit this October afternoon. He stared at his mom’s swollen suitcases with their forest green floral embroidery and worn seams. He cried the whole way, but not too loudly, just in case being quiet really was the key to sticking by his mom’s side. Hugo cried often, so it wasn’t unusual for him to be sniffling. Not for any reason in particular, except that he felt like he had to. He didn’t even notice it. He’d be playing outside, running up in circles around the apartment complex, training for his own future mission to Venus or Saturn, when he’d feel the wet tears spattering his wrists. He’d run harder until his sadness faded into a background noise at the back of his skull, and his toes bled in his too-small shoes.
The drive took more than an hour, since Mom had to keep pulling over and smacking the solar plate at the top of their Honda Civic to keep it working. Power surging through the car in fits and starts made the dashboard light up in glimmering colors. Hugo likened it to the bright consoles of spaceships on PBS specials, when the displays lit up and undulated like a living intelligence, guiding hibernating astronauts through the vacuum black of space and deftly swerving around rocky moons and metallic asteroids.
The Civic came to a rumbling stop outside a Waffle House off of 147. Muhammad (“Dad” or even “Father” seemed a little too familiar a name for such a brooding figure) leaned against the grimy windows, hands stuck into his armpits like he was cold. Hugo, on the other hand, had sweat through his jacket and scarf. The tears left salty marks on his chin. He was too wet and gummy to see a man as significant as his father, a man so immensely important his appearance was strictly reserved for holidays, birthdays, and rare surprise visits where he rewarded Hugo with gifts and lifted him up, so he could be as regal and imposing as Muhammad.
His mother left him in the back seat for a whispered conference complete with heated gestures. His mom’s face wrinkled into an all-over frown and Muhammad stared at the car, eyebrows up like he’d been expecting someone other than Hugo in the back seat.
“I’ve got a job, okay! I told you!”
Embarrassed by his own shout, his father immediately turned his back to Hugo and bent to whisper something in his mom’s ear, which must have worked, because her frown eased, and she leaned into his arms for a while. It impressed Hugo enough to halt his crying, and he instead focused on re-picturing his parents. This time they sat beside him, and all three were drinking hot chocolate through the dry winter months.
His mother brought Hugo out of the car, picking him up despite his nine years and handling him like an infant, which Hugo didn’t protest at all. He allowed himself to be gingerly transferred and set down by the restaurant door. She grabbed Hugo’s Batman duffle bag from the Honda’s trunk, upsetting the solar panel again. Muhammad spent a while fixing it while his mother went through the duffle, confirming Hugo had everything he needed. Then she threw her arms around Hugo in a long embrace, before heading up towards the mountains.
Hugo and his father watched the car get back on the highway in complete silence. Hugo’s hands were gloved in puffy blue mittens, and Muhammad's were adorned with silver bands. At last, Muhammad put his hand on Hugo’s shoulder, making him hunch forward awkwardly, and quietly asked, “You hungry?”
Muhammad stretched out his friend’s window, a wifi wand in his hand, trying to redirect the neighbor’s internet. Hugo could see the muscles in his forearm twitching below the skin.
“Got it!”
Muhammad’s friend Tomas shouted, and the picture finally cleared on their projection set. The astronauts’ faces were coming into focus. Hugo leapt to his feet when Jamie Marcus’ face came into view. He reached his hands through the projection to touch Jamie’s white NASA uniform. He got up close to the set to look into Jamie’s eyes.
“Sit down kid!”
“Let him.”
Muhammad's commanding tone sounded from the window, firm but not loud. They’d been staying at Tomas’ for the last week. Muhammad’s place wouldn’t let him in, the welcome screen on the front door announcing a change in rent and dispensing a single one-night housing voucher paired with an eviction notice. Muhammad banged on the complex doors with his fists demanding an explanation, until the whole building went into lockdown and announced the authorities had been contacted.
He left Hugo at Tomas’ while he worked, his hours constantly fluctuating and confusing Hugo’s internal clock. Muhammad barely slept, instead spending his minuscule off-time either wolfing down instasmoothies right from the foil packet or praying on the worn carpet he always had with him.
Hugo filled most afternoons tuned into lessons on his tablet, both relieved that his mom had gotten him out of the classroom for the rest of the year, but also strangely missing the familiar halls of school, not to mention the warm breakfast they got twice a week. Tomas’ place didn’t have much food in it, and Tomas’ mother wouldn’t let Hugo cook on his own, not trusting him to leave the living room. He practiced long strides, working on his wide-paced low-gravity walk and jumping up and down to build muscle strength. He spent hours with Tomas’ cats, trying to learn their language of hisses.
The only relief was knowing that soon they’d send the next broadcast from the Mars mission. The final broadcast before the crew went down for another eighteen months of sleep, at least. Hugo, ignoring the tablet’s instructions, spent most of his days listening to Jamie Marcus’ video channel. Jamie wore bright Byzantine blue, glittering eyeshadow and thick silver lipstick. Jamie spoke with a deep, confident voice. Sometimes the videos were about science and all the wonders of space. Sometimes it felt like a diary full of personal details about what Jamie’s hopes for Mars were, and how they’d worked their whole life to get there. With skin light-brown and an athletic frame, the astronaut glowed with confidence and charm. A legend made real. In all of Hugo’s pictures of his future self, he looked just like that and ran—comfortably, even in space boots—across the wide Mars desert. He would race Jamie to one of NASA’s white domes, his limbs long and proud like his father’s, and all his movements dignified, like his mom’s. In Hugo’s picture of Mars, NASA’s dome rose like a castle from the red-clay soil, and all the astronauts stared at him wistfully inside their helmets, wishing they were as fast and as smart as he was.
Hugo learned that the final video would be projected to Earth as quickly as satellites could bounce the signal—a time lag of only a few hours. This was the closestHugo had ever come to hearing Jamie’s real-live voice.
Jamie’s face filled the screen. They winked at the camera, showing off eyeshadow that shimmered between a brilliant gold and a mysterious fuchsia. Jamie pouted, “Oh, it’s hard being so far from home. We can see the Earth from here and to us the whole planet is the size of a dime. Imagine! We’re conducting our final tests here. You can see my bonsai experiment is going well. My tree, Yoshi, is growing nicely using my new formula of Mars minerals. I can’t wait to try it out in the dome. All that’s left is to put the finishing touches on my hibernation mix. Thank you, all you blessed Earthlings at home, who have sent me recommendations. I’ve settled on a mix of language-learning, my favorite equations and some electroreggae from home, and yes, Mom, I’m including your very own jazz selections and early 2000’s alt-rock. I’m also including guest lectures for my crewmates on all their specialties and free lectures courtesy of Yale University to broaden my horizons. Y'all can download my list from NASA.org with promocode MARS #35. It’s free for the next 24 hours thanks to our sponsor, Amazon. Before I hand it over to Sasha, I want to send all you on planet Earth my everlasting love. Wish me sweet dreams, America!” They kissed their manicured hand and blew a glistening-lipstick kiss to the screen. The feed switched to the ship’s exterior, showing off the luminous control panels before going suddenly dark.
“Shit!” Tomas yelled.
“No cursing!” his mother said, reaching over too late to cover Hugo’s ears.
Muhammad folded himself back inside the living room.
“I can’t get it back.”
“Our data’s maxed out. Neighbors too, probably. And just in time for los primos to visit. They’ll complain.”
“Who are primos?” Hugo asked, hungry for information as always.
#
November
A week later they were sleeping in Muhammad's SUV. His father put the back seat down and covered it in blankets to make it more comfortable. He even plugged the car into the outlet of a mall parking lot so they could have power all night. He kept the heat on low and played soothing ocean sounds through the stereo.
“It’s like we’re on a boat,” said Hugo.
“That’s right. This is our ship.”
“Can we be pirates?”
“Pirates steal. Let’s be sailors, instead.”
“Okay, but only if I get to be the Captain.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Yes, Captain, sir.”
“Yes, Captain, sir.”
Hugo giggled. His tall father called him sir.
They’d left Tomas’ place that afternoon before the relatives arrived to take their place on the plaid couch. Tomas’ mother had hugged him before he left and given him a box of Sour Patch Kids. He ate so many, his tongue went numb and sugar-burnt. She’d also given him a box of mouth-watering arepas con queso, which he ate so quickly he’d almost thrown up. Muhammad, who he’d started calling “Dad,” had tried to make him slow down, but he couldn’t keep himself from greedily lapping up the cheese sandwich.
Hugo jumped around the SUV searching for pirates, until his father shouted at him to sleep. He curled up under the covers, while his dad reclined in the front seat. He shut his eyes tight and tried to call up one of the pictures of his mom. The one he created for himself where she made gingerbread houses with the smile-faced children at her new job. When he still couldn’t sleep, his fists tightening with jealousy, he thought instead about Jamie asleep in the space shuttle. Twinkling eyelids shut and strong arms crossed over his chest like a dozing pharaoh sailing through the pitch black of space.
#
A bright light and bang woke him up. He jumped awake, looking for pirates, or his mother, or a gunshot, or an asteroid. A police officer knocked on the car door with the butt of his flashlight. Muhammad woke up, quickly throwing his hands in front of his face, but the knocking didn’t stop. The officer opened the door of the car with the override code and dragged his father out.
Hugo dived under the covers, eyes still blurry with sleep. He lay still, counting his heartbeats, hands clasped tightly around his elbows, nails digging into his skin.
His father came back a while later. “I’m sorry, we can’t stay here. Put on your seatbelt.”
“Why can’t I go back to my mom?”
“You can’t yet.”
“Why not? Because my mom’s working?”
“Your mom’s okay. But she’s been in a car accident.”
“Can I see her?”
“You’ve got to stay here while your mom gets better. It’ll be okay, alright? I’ll take care of everything.”
Hugo conjured the car up in their mind. Too many pictures started to form. The car flying off a mountain and into great, towering pine trees. His mother suspended in the air, cold rushing into the car through shattered windows and white snowflakes sticking to her long, dark hair.
#
December
Muhammad took Hugo to the Smoothie King, where he worked extra shifts on top of his concessions job at the Bull City stadium. He gave Hugo an enormous, smelly kale shake to drink. Once he’d checked that Hugo had finished the revolting, green vitashake, he led Hugo into the back room. He picked up a plastic bag. Fearing another lemongrass snack, Hugo stared glumly at the Target bag.
“Cover your eyes.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Please.”
Hugo covered his eyes in that sneaky way that ensured he could still see in between his lashes and through the gaps of his fingers. His father pulled out the helmet first—metal, sleek and magnificent in the fluorescent light.
“A helmet!”
An entire suit emerged from inside the bag. With Jamie’s name written on the back.
“Is that for me?”
“Yes, it’s for you.”
His father bent down so his face could be level with his son’s.
“I want you to know that every day, every single day you’re with me.”
“I know.”
Hugo smiled, too busy trying on the suit to say anything, happy to hear his father speak only to him and not to anyone else. He played quietly ‘til the end of his father’s shift. He drew invisible lines from all the corners of the room and its furniture. A thin line from the shiny corner of the AC unit, another from the edge of a brown sofa, plus a curved arc following the edge of the light overhead. He jumped carefully in the spaces between the perilous lines, twisting his arms and legs, almost dancing in his suit across the surface of a dangerous planet.
#
The next morning, Hugo had to drink yet another terrible smoothie in the backseat of the car. He’d spent the previous night curled up in the passenger’s seat while mosquitos flew through the open windows and devoured him.
He didn’t hear his father say anything, but he caught sight of him in the rearview mirror. His eyes were puffy and tearing up as they slowly made their way onto I-147. Cars honked at them and angrily passed them in the left lane as they ambled along. They stopped at an unremarkable building behind Durham Tech.
The Durham “Sweet Dreams” Hibernation Center used to be a tobacco processing factory once, like so many buildings in town. With its rusty-colored brick, creamy mortar, and boxy sides, it could be the Community Center or even Hugo’s School Testing Center. Outside on the cracked sidewalk, an older woman sang in Spanish in front of a handful of lit candles. Her white hair was swept back in an embroidered handkerchief with faded red flowers. A couple sat beside her with a sign, “Work for Cash. Need Help with Wake Up.”
Another woman, not so old, jumped in front of them on their way to the door.
“Can you spare any change? I have to get my baby. I only need fifty more for the wake-up fee.”
Hugo stepped back, but Muhammad moved him forward, past the woman. A bearded man in a tie-dye shirt with beaded, blonde dreads handed them pamphlets as they walked toward the door.
“Thank you for helping Mother Earth, man!”
Muhammad walked coolly by him, but Hugo tugged one of his dreads, not able to keep from the temptation of stealing a sparkly bead. But the beads were secure in the man’s hair, and he glared at Hugo with pink, dilated eyes. Muhammad yanked him through the front door and inside, past a large display of a gorgeously sad woman in a negligee that read, “Depressed? Skip Winter.”
#
“These are the weekly maintenance rates for a child of his size, with the hibernation initiation fee broken up over the first few months. There’s the cycle payments. Then there’s the standard wake-up, clean-up, and revitalize fees. None of that includes any extension payments or maintenance costs since he’ll only be with us for the season.”
Inside the free-consultation booth, Muhammad went over the numbers again with the Intake Specialist. She was a round woman with verdant cat-eye glasses and bleached hair that framed her face. She took notes on a fancy, credit card thin tablet and tapped the screen with her manicured fingers. Her formal suit jacket almost concealed the sleeve of tattoos that crept up her arm.
“I don’t remember the wake-up package being so much.”
“You’re a former guest?” The intake specialist looked up.
“A while back. I was in the second-chance program.”
“We lost funding for inmates. But this is still a heavily subsidized rate and as you see, there’s an economical payment plan.”
“It’s just for the season. To be clear.”
The intake specialist nodded and turned to Hugo. Her pink lipstick was somewhat disappointing when compared to Jamie’s bold, metallic choices. Hugo vowed that when he was older he would never wear such a boring color. He considered pastels beneath him.
“What recordings would you like, young man? Do you want to see our selection?”
She gestured to a shelf by her desk.
“We’ve got our 510c3s, those are free, like ‘The Road to Self-Sufficiency,’ ‘Dealing with Debt,’ ‘Jesus Saves,’ and ‘The Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.’ Then there are some mostly musical ones, I think there’s a Disney one left——”
“I want what the astronauts have. I’m going to be an astronaut.”
“You know it hardly matters. I mean like only a teeny-tiny percentage of people even remember what they hear, much less process—"
“You heard him. What NASA gives them.”
“Sir, what I’m saying is, we don’t have that.”
“I downloaded Jamie’s playlist. I have it!” Hugo piped up, suddenly focused. He’d used his father’s monthly data allowance getting it onto his tablet. Muhammad hadn’t even yelled, just shook his head like he was too tired to be angry.
“You can use the recording, can’t you?”
Muhammad kept pressing until the woman agreed. He signed all the paperwork, using a pen on real-life printed paper. Hugo had to put his thumbprint on one, marveling at how the ink felt sticky on his skin.
Hugo kept picking at the chair arms, but his father brought his chin up so he could look him in the eyes.
“I’ve done this before. It’ll be alright. It’s just for a few months until I can save enough to get us a place. Then your mom will be better. And we’ll wake you up together. You won’t even remember this time.”
His father hugged him until the lady motioned him to leave. He wouldn’t go—instead, he stood there until the plump blonde woman took Hugo’s hand and led him to the prep room. He turned behind him and craned his neck to see Muhammad staring at him, looking worried and surprisingly small in the intake office’s large pleather chair. Hugo hugged his plastic Target bag to his chest, making certain his spacesuit was secure.
They stopped in a conference room with a row of low benches, like a church without an altar. Other people were already sitting there. A weeping woman sat with her shoulders hunched over like two round lumps beside her hanging head. A whole family sat holding hands and praying in Spanish. They wore faded jean shorts and T-shirts with “Henson’s Farm” written on them. A couple wearing long tunics and woven sandals leaned together, hands linked and faces shut in a closed, pinched look. Hugo saw another girl his age with red, frizzy hair flowing from her shoulders, her face alight with lovely pink freckles. Hugo sat behind her and stared at her halo of fiery hair, until she spun around to stare back at him.
#
Hugo put on pajamas as instructed, annoyed with the rough feeling of the fabric and its ugly puke-green checker print. The signs on the walls proclaimed that he was about to undertake a miraculous journey, but the models in the photos were wearing silken nighties and looked a lot happier than anyone Hugo had seen so far.
He’d already taken some pink, chalky tablets. The foul sweet kind that pretended to taste like cherry but didn’t. He put his spacesuit on top of his pjs but held his helmet tucked under his arm like Jamie walking to the launchpad.
They led the little redheaded girl out first. Her hair was messed up from the clothing change and sticking out like a bird’s nest. He ducked past the nurses to follow her. No one stopped him as he padded carefully behind her, his cotton booties gliding across the tile floor.
The hallway poured out into a vast warehouse even bigger than the gym his mom went to on Saturday mornings. Rows and rows of pods filled the floor, their crystals clouded and cracked. Above them, a makeshift second level had been built out of steel pipes and laminate. Cords hung from this second level, wrapping around the pods and zigzagging across the floor in twisted lines and lumps. Most pods had small monitors attached to them with dull grey-green screens like the thermostat at their apartment. They took the red-headed girl down a row, past some pods that were partly opened. He saw an unmoving hand jutting from one, the nails grown so long they curved down like talons.
Hugo turned and ran. His feet fighting for purchase on the linoleum floor. A nurse shouted behind him, but he ignored her and headed back down the hallway. He tripped on a set of cords and an alarm sounded. His heart stopped, worried that the clawed people would wake and snatch him. A rough hand pulled him up by the back of his suit. He screamed, but it was only a nurse. He glared at Hugo in disgust and sat him abruptly down on the thin mattress pad of an empty pod.
“Hush. You’ll be asleep soon.”
“I need my astronaut tape. I’m supposed to have my astronaut tape!”
The nurse nodded at him sternly.
He clamped his mouth shut, embarrassed by the whiny, little-kid strain in his voice. He stared at the nurse’s wide nose and the mole that jutted from the man's forehead until the mole started to turn fuzzy and dance off his face.
“There. Just rest. I’ll get you hooked up.”
Hugo slumped forward and his helmet rolled out of his hands. He moved to pick it up but couldn’t reach. Instead, he lay back, too tired to move. A sharp needle bit into his arm, which he was aware of, but it didn’t hurt. His mouth filled with a sour taste like he had taken a swallow from an expired milk carton. He managed to bring his hands up and across his chest as his eyes fluttered, fighting to stay open. Someone put his helmet at the foot of the pod, in the extra space between his short legs and the edge of the mattress. He could see the blurry shape in between his toes. A distant echoey sound came in like whales singing at the bottom of the ocean. He hoped it was Jamie’s mix. He closed his eyes and drifted into the long sleep.
He slept through the winter.
He slept through the spring and summer. His hair grew long and his skin peeled.
He slept through Jamie’s Mars landing. His legs became weak like muscles that have stayed too long in zero-g.
He slept through Jamie’s long flight home, where the returning crew conducted experiments in the vacuum of space and examined rare red stones from dry riverbeds.
He slept through elections, urban renewal efforts, and hot humid summers.
He slept through heavy rain and chunks of hail. Sirens and screaming winds.
The storm at last woke him. It clawed the old tobacco factory, swiping off sections of the roof and tearing at the old brick.
#
Hugo’s mother once told him a story of a sleeping beauty who woke with a kiss from a handsome prince. He dreamt of Jamie’s metallic tinted lips, iridescent and sparkling like stars, pressed against his tingling forehead. Waking up his senses with a painful tickle. He blinked hard, but sleep clouded his eyes and tinted his vision dark. He prayed to open his eyes to castles and cowboys. Or even better, a Sunday breakfast with both of his parents chomping on bacon and cheesy grits.
He darted his hungry tongue over cracked lips. Dry skin was plastered across his whole body like a thin, fleshy coat. Claws burst out of his fingertips and blunted his touch. His arms and legs were heavy like stones.
Above him, his sight slowly cleared. He saw stars surrounded by a chewy darkness. Water dripped onto his face, making him shiver. He couldn’t remember just where he was. He saw himself in a wrecked car, looking out a shattered sunroof—but that couldn’t be right. Cold water dripped onto his face, his neck, his shoulders, helping to feel. Must be a hole in the ceiling.
He slowly moved his hands along his body, patting carefully so as not to scratch himself. The lid of his pod had shattered. Wires slid around him like tiny snakes. He levered himself up, breathing hard. He wanted to give up but couldn’t. Astronauts don’t give up. Even when they’re pushing back against hard g during reentry.
When at last Hugo could stand, he saw the building’s red brick ruins surrounded by a filthy moat. Around him, pods lay dark and sealed. The people inside wrapped up tight in hibernation like mummies. The lights on the monitors had gone out.
He called for help, his voice hoarse and duck-like. He could hear the wind still roaring but no sound of anyone else. Not even snoring.
He climbed down from his pallet, limbs still heavy in the wet air. He began to walk, stumbling and crawling at first. Rainwater made ugly puddles on the floor. He shivered and craned his neck to find an exit.
He found he could remember everything he’d heard while dreaming. The distance of the Earth from the sun. The optimal throttle to use when operating asteroid mining equipment. The best of classical pop and electroreggae. He even knew the names of some of the machines connected to the pods. He could add up the increasing costs of hibernation in his head and calculate the rolling wake-up fees that kept so many slumbering. The formulas came to him easily now.
He thought he might build himself a rocket. He considered the trajectory he’d need to break earth’s orbit and rendezvous with the Phobos space station if he left from the observatory in Raleigh, and the fuel he’d need for a Mars heading. He could do whatever he wanted out among the stars. No one can evict you from space. Like Jamie’s crewmate, he could watch specially engineered plants soak up the noxious gases of Mars and spit out oxygen.
He wished he had a new memory of how to cut his ugly fingernails. His mother would know. She cared for everyone diligently, making ginger cookies for ill neighbors, listening to Aunt Sarah complain about her job, and waking up early to fix him breakfast. When she came home after working late, she’d sit quietly on the edge of his bed so as not to wake him. He would pretend to be asleep as she whispered a loving goodnight.
He turned his back on the exit and climbed onto the nearest pallet. He pried open the hibernation pod using the emergency release valve. He’d known exactly where it was. Inside, a woman with blonde hair lay sleeping, smelling foul and dusty like a moldy basement. He gagged and reached up to pinch his nose shut. His nails cut a bleeding gash across his face. He cried.
His father told him to pray when he needed courage, and to remember all the people in the past going back forever who were cheering him on from their invisible place in heaven. Even if he looked like a monster.
He kissed the sleeping woman on her forehead like she was beautiful and tenderly removed all the cords from her body. He heard Jamie’s voice explain the best way to wake a slumbering crew. “Hibernation is like time travel. The great thing is that we can go really far. The bad news is, you can only ever go in one direction, and that’s forward.”
One by one he woke the others from the long sleep and freed them from their debts.