text: Pain. My elbows, my knees ached. My mouth felt tight. I moaned, a sound like a wounded deer. “You’re alive!” he cried. I turned my head, my neck cracking. A man, with a head of unruly brown hair and a grizzled beard, looked at me with fervor. “Where...am I...” My lips seemed gummed together, I was parched; my throat burned when I spoke. “You’re here with me darling, don’t you recognize me?” he implored. “It’s Victor.” I put my head back down, for it seemed so heavy, and I closed my eyes, but he shook me and would not let me be. “Elizabeth, I’ve brought you back,” he said. “Wa...ter,” I groaned, and my voice was as harsh as the wind that blew outside, rattling the windows of the house. The following days I came back to life. He fed me and watered me, and my body regained strength enough for me to think. But this wasn’t my body. This was a stranger’s body. My skin had been smooth and supple, pink with a tinge of gold. This skin was pale and dry, wrinkled and ashy. My hair had been long and brown, cascading to my bosom in glossy ringlets. Now it was coarse and scraggly like the fur of a wet animal, and I could feel that I was balding in various spots on my head. I did not ask for a mirror. I saw no one save Victor who would come down into my dark basement to feed me and talk to me. “My love,” he would croon, “my heart, my sunshine.” “Take me back,” I wailed, when I regained my voice. “Take me back.” I meant for him to take me back to that dreamless slumber from whence I had come. I could not remember what it had been like to sleep, and now I did not sleep at all, even though the sun rose and fell many times. I saw the cat sleep, Victor sleep, even the cockroaches sleep. But when I closed my eyes, sleep did not come. That’s how I suspected I had died. “We will travel,” he said to me, “We will see the world. We will do all the things we said we would do together.” But I remembered very little of what we had said we would do together. I remembered glimpses, here and there, of light, of a book curled up on my lap, his unruly brown hair leaning against my knee. I remembered that. But I did not remember who he was. In fact, I did not remember who I had been or any others I had known. Glimpses visited, detached visions of faces flitting past like the shadows that danced on the walls from the candlelight. The faces scurried through my mind like insects across the walls, and told me I had had a mother, a father, a brother who died young. But as to what memories we had shared together-those things were missing. My ability to speak remained intact, as did my knowledge of how basic physics worked in the world. But so much more was missing. “How long has it been?” I asked. “Many years,” he said. He said he had found the secret to immortality. And then he had come for me, frozen in my cryogenic slumber. He would give me what he had found for himself, that which had come after my time. “I’ll help you remember,” he said. “Just give me a chance.” So I did. We traveled the world, my face hidden by a veil. We saw a great many things, from the icy cliffs of the North to the humid jungle tropics of the South. Alligators basking in rivers, lions in a hunt, a flock of flamingos darkening the sun. We saw them all, and more. But still I was unmoved. I felt nothing. Saw nothing. Everything felt as cold and far away as the moon. Even the kisses that he lavished upon me. “Take me back,” I said, finally. Resigned, he took me back to the house, and prepared a fluid that would slow the beating of my heart. That’s when he gave me a kiss, on my lips. He never cared that I now looked different. Again I remembered the book on my lap, the light, his hair upon my knee. I still could not feel what he said I once had felt. But I felt something now, like a small nudge of warmth. I kissed him back. “Thank you for trying,” I said. “I loved you, I think.” “I love you still,” he said, and injected the solution into my arm.