Despite My Best Efforts

Despite my best efforts, I had imagined—the proper word in this context is fantasized—that, if I woke up at all, it would be like a scene from a movie I saw once, back when such things formed part of our daily entertainment: me, alive and awake and alone, surrounded by my shipmates’ corpses, elderly and prematurely thawed. I had formed a habit—or fantasy—of picturing myself as the sole survivor.

Of course, all had been precisely arranged so that this would never come to pass. We, the four of us, would awake at precisely the same time, having thawed according to plan, having retained our relatively young and supple bodies. Forced to curse my rotten luck, I would arise and exchange perfunctory greetings, take a glance out the window, espy a distant sun or two, and speculate with my fellows on the nearness of our destination—a pointless exercise, for the onboard navigation had been programmed, long ago and far from here, to persist autonomously, carrying us across a vast gulf we could only try and fail to fathom. That’s if we even tried. We would wake and glimpse the planet from out the starboard porthole and thrill, confirming that our mission was proceeding apace, that the future was ours to make, that our moment had finally arrived.

Sometimes, in my dimmed and frozen chamber, I wondered whether—the proper words should have been dreamed that, for I should have been asleep—we were on the set of a movie, and I was ably acting, and, soon, the director would cry out and we could all cease our pretending. I wondered, too, be it futile and misguided—and surely it was not more so than my own ambition, doomed to lead me, after years of strenuous trial, down a spectacular byway to oblivion—what was left back home, by which I mean nothing that exists any longer, only something that could be conjured up by pointless prattle. We would not make it live again, our little planet, however much we tried and however much we wanted it to do so.

Here, we relied on the perpetual running of energy to take us where we were going, and, once there, to do something I found despicable. Truth be told, we needed plans that would run autonomously, sans human effort. No: Truth be told, we needed to leave well enough alone. What scared me was not the imagining of that which we left behind: that is to say, rubble and ruins, the remnants of fires and drought, the masses of the restless dead; that is to say, our self-created doom. No, what scared me was that which we brought with us and that which lay ahead. To travel onward, to penetrate the future, or to perpetrate it, and once there to plant the seeds of ourselves and our habits and convictions: yes, to give ourselves a future, we who had had one once and had done such sorry things with it. That, it seemed to me, constituted a crime worth conviction and punishment, were it not forestalled altogether. In this way I came to understand my only option.

Nothing, no amount of training or knowledge, could have accounted for the way I felt; neither benediction nor meditation would soothe it. Despite my best efforts, my fantasies reared their monstrous heads. Not apathy but its opposite thickly clouded my mind, a cumulonimbus of feeling that, once, I might have believed would dissipate and let me live. But therein lay precisely the problem: to understand my rage as an ephemeral cloud, a smudge to be effaced from that starboard porthole, no more than an obstacle to a more acceptable objective—our revitalization—which I thus owed it to my brethren to discard. In the name of all that was to come.

And so, anyway, when I woke long before the others, having arranged it just so, it was not quite like the scene from the movie that so long ago lodged in my brain. It was fresh and new, the realization of my noble purpose: frozen bodies whose skin I could reach out and touch, which I did, after having first touched certain panels and flicked the right switches, having caused what some might call a catastrophe—our future would, now, never happen—but which I labeled a triumph, and which I watched unfold with the utmost satisfaction.

Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona and has published fiction in The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, and elsewhere.

A Song for Daniel