I could not remember much, but I did recall photos I had seen of a burial chamber in Egypt. It had catered to middle-class people three thousand years earlier who could afford sarcophagi but who could not pay for – or did not merit – ornate tombs. The sarcophagi were just stacked on one another; piled up like suitcases on an airport tarmac luggage trolley. This is what I thought of as I looked around now. Cases were all around me, stacked four, five, six high and stretching away for rows in some giant warehouse.

And I had been in one, too, but mine had just opened. It was on the top, fortunately, of a stack of five. I had been covered in a clear slime that I tried to shake off, once I lowered myself down to the concrete floor. I dropped down into a gap between “my” stack of sarcophagi and the one next to it.

The warehouse wasn’t particularly warm. I pressed off the gel the best I could and then walked to a space amid the stacks. It turned out to be a cleared path that led to either end of this long, spare building. This warehouse was made of metal, painted red down at my level with a gray roof above. I began walking what I assumed was a route toward an exit.

All I could remember at that point was that something traumatic had happened to me. I remembered falling into darkness, and people around me – trying to help, working on me. Doctors, nurses, maybe paramedics.

That was about all I had. Prior to that – I could remember Jen, Ara, our house. I also had the sense that a long time had passed.

The stacks of cases loomed on either side of me. Some were white, some black, some gray. Mine had been white. They came in different sizes; mostly as long as an adult coffin, but a few smaller. Each one had, now that I looked for it, a screen on the side with a number. They did not hum, but were clearly functioning. I assumed each one held another person.

(What on earth would happen if some poor guy on the bottom of the stack woke up suddenly, as I had just done? I had no idea. Maybe someone checked on them? Or maybe a lot of them held dead persons – I mean truly dead – who had done just this and been trapped?)

Walking along, I made out a man standing in the pathway. He heard me and turned toward me. He was Black, and about my age. He wore dark blue pants, a lighter blue shirt, with a bag over his shoulder which I took to be a tool bag. He was holding a long tube that looked something like a bazooka but struck me more as a tool, perhaps a medical device.

“Didn’t hear yih,” he said. “Just out?”

“I . . . believe so,” I said.

“Got a shirt for yih.” He reached into the bag and took out a long shirt; very long. It looked like a Dickensian sleeping gown. It struck me that these cases must have opened up often enough for it to make sense for him to carry clothing for the naked newcomers.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“Had you been – waiting for me?” I asked.

He shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

“I’m waiting on all yih.”

He saw me looking at the tube he held in his left hand.

“And working on some of these cases. Hurryin things up for some. But look, yih just keep going, down this corridor here, and then at that far wall make a right. You’ll see an office door. They’ll help there.”

The door of that office was open. Inside, a woman sat at a sort of drafting table, preoccupied.

“Hello,” I said.

She ignored me. I saw that the surface of the table was a giant screen. Not exactly a video screen, but there were lights on it she could manipulate and move around.

“Hello, a man out there sent me in,” I tried again. This time she looked up. She looked young. Her hair was piled up in a towering top knot.

“Yes? Are yih just out?”

“I am, yes.”

“What number?”

“What?”

“There was a number on your case. On front. Do yih remember it?”

“No. I didn’t know to look.”

“Can yih recall yer name?” she asked.

“Doran. Perry Doran.”

“Hyang on then.”

She slid her fingers around the desk. Green and yellow lights activated and darted around. The thing struck me as an abacus, but for words.

“Aye,” she said, almost to herself. “Yih were an early one. An early one.”

She slid a finger around some more and then added:

“Well my goodness.”

Then, to me again:

“Did yih have a file?”

“I – no. I just got out of the case thing. I didn’t have anything in there with me.”

“I mean running,” she said. “It wouldn’t be in the case.”

“Running?”

She just looked at me.

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“Well, no. I don’t have anything, I’m afraid.”

She dropped her eyes back down to the table.

“This would be yih, then,” she said. “Yih’re one of the very first put down we know of.”

“Put down?”

“All of yih out in those cases. I suppose yih didn’t know how many others would do it, did yih. Since yih were one of the first.”

“I have to tell you – I’m not even clear what I did, much less anyone else.”

She didn’t answer this, but instead retrieved a small ball, like a toy rubber ball, from underneath the desk. Apparently it had just been printed. It was green, and I guessed it would bounce. She handed it to me.

“Take that to the Dwelling Office. Through that door there, first door on your right.”

“This?” I held it up.

“Yes.”

I would have assumed she’d give me a form, or an identification card, or something, but it turned out to be – a rubber ball.

“I will. Can you tell me – where am I? How long was I in that case?”

“This is Toronto. And yih must have been in that case at least two hundred years. This is 2242. First of March.”

*

In weeks to come I seriously wondered if that rubber ball they gave me was a comfort object rather than anything really necessary for my processing. They had seen thousands – tens of thousands – of people like me, woken up from comas with few memories and no clothing; they had probably learned it was helpful to hand us something to squeeze as we took the very first steps to reenter society. I never saw those little balls used anywhere else as identification or keys or anything else.

*

The Dwelling Office looked like, I would eventually learn, the dwellings themselves in which they placed us. It was very basic, cheaply built, and filled with fake wood paneling and a few plastic plants. I couldn’t decide if it was oddly familiar – looking like an outdated dentist’s office from my childhood – or just odd.

There was another bureaucrat in this office, again behind a desk which had a top like a very old video game. Similar to the first woman, he dealt with me quickly enough but had clearly done this a thousand times before and was ready for a different job.

Again I had to greet him, since he just sat at desk silently after I entered.

“Ball,” he then said.

“What?”

“Yih must have been handed a ball by the sorter.”

“Ah.” I handed it to him.

He took it and supposedly checked it by waving it underneath the table.

“Do you have a file?” he asked me.

“I suppose you mean a running file? But no, I don’t have anything.”

“Yes, running. But that’s all right, we’ll get yih somewhere.”

“Let me ask you – it became common for people to place themselves in those containers?”

“To preserve themselves,” he said. “Yes. You don’t remember that? Hasn’t come back to yih, yet?”

“No. I don’t think I ever knew that. I am remembering a bit more from when I was alive, but I’m pretty certain that was not happening yet, back then. You know, the previous woman I spoke to said I was one of the first to be put in one.”

“Eh, is that so. So yih didn’t anticipate how big that became. Well, no matter. We have a room for yih.”

“A room here?”

“No. A complex. It’s pleasant, yih won’t mind staying there.”

This time they did hand me something in writing; a card with an address.

“There’ll be a transport out in the yard. It will take yih there.”

“Do I – get the ball back?”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” He handed it over.

*

The apartment building they placed me in was six stories, and it didn’t look like it had taken very long to build. It was a dull sandstone outside, with a 1970s low-budget legal office feel inside as I said. It held nothing but revived old-timers like me. I had an unremarkable apartment midway up; all the apartments were unremarkable.

The front door had a mail slot, and I was astounded to learn that communication with me was handled with just paper postcards, rather than with some successor to emails or to the internet, or by direct transmissions into my brain, et cetera. A card would just drop in, from time to time. I never managed to see the postal carrier who brought them.

“Occupation to be determined,” one said. “Await further instructions.”

That sounded a bit Orwellian to me. Would they order me to report to the Ministry of Surveillance to maintain the pneumatic tubes, or something?

*

If anyone would have told me that I would be essentially dead for several hundred years and then brought back, I would have guessed that there likely would have been a fair amount of celebrity involved; because how often could a society receive this sort of time-traveling resurrected visitor?

Well, plenty often, it turned out. I gradually met a number of people on my floor, and elsewhere in the building, and learned their stories.

An older guy named Walter – who was quite overweight; apparently those caskets didn’t shave off any pounds even as decades passed – had been a hover-taxi driver, or pilot I guess, with a side gig of farming a patch of hillside land in southeastern Ohio somewhere. He’d been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he said, before there was a cure for it.

(Which brings up a point of order: Most of these white case things, including mine, did not merely put their occupants into stasis; they cured them. That was the case [pun unintended] for Walter. For others, the cases did just keep them alive for decades or centuries until a cure was found for their illness. Of course, there had been mountains of instances of lost records in which no one knew who the person was or why he or she had been enclosed in the first place. That was some of the work going on in the warehouse where I had emerged – simply diagnosing the illnesses.)

“I’m so lucky,” he told me, “but it’s strange that I’m celebrating all on my own, you know? So many miracles here, no one even notices. Ah well. It’s all good, I’m just not sure what I’ll do. Everything is self-piloted, now, and it looks like people don’t fly around like they used to anyway. I wish I could get my land back, but of course it ain’t my land any longer. What big heads we have, thinking we ever own the land, you know?”

Another neighbor, Bud Silverman, had had prostate cancer that had spread through nearly his entire body, apparently.

“My spine, liver, kidney – I only had one, by then – lungs, colon, everywhere. Why bother calling it prostate cancer at that point, right? The pain was something else. And I wasn’t a guy who would usually complain about that.

“The only bright side of it was that I felt better about giving away the kidney. I had given it to my wife’s sister, eighteen years before. Ex-wife thereafter. But that wasn’t the issue, you know – the issue was that the sister had still died, well before I got sick. Even with my kidney she lived only eight, nine years. And when I heard it, I asked – this is awful – ‘Well, can I get my kidney back?’ Ha, not really. I wanted to, though. But of course when I got so sick, I knew I wouldn’t need the thing after all, so it’s just as well someone else had gotten it. I think it helped her out, for some of her years afterward anyway.

“I think it was the bovine antibiotics in Brazil. The cause, the trigger. I was in shoes, you know. Shoe factories. Made them in Brazil, the Caribbean. Cheap labor back then. Cheap too back in your days, eh? I wasn’t there so much later than you were. A few decades. Maybe more. But how much did things really change? But anyway, I sourced the leather, did some other related tasks, procurement. And I would go to these ranches, these cattle farms. Cut into the Amazon. That was an awful thing, I admit. But they did it more for the beef than for the hides. The beef was where the real money was, for them. So I didn’t sweat the trees, you know? But anyway, they didn’t want – we didn’t want, I admit – any blemishes on the hides. For the leather. For the shoes, you know. So they medicated those cows something fierce. There were probably rules against some of that stuff in the U.S., but not down there. Who knows what all they shot into them. Smooth skin, smooth hide, you should have seen it. And I think that was what made me so sick. I think a lot of those ranchers were sick, too. So many drugs around, and the pesticides and whatnot. Revenge of the trees, you know? Or the revenge of the indigenous guys who had lived there. What a mess that was.

“So they closed me up in one of those cases. Docs told me it was my best bet. My only bet, really. And these clowns here pulled me out three months ago. I shouldn’t call them clowns; they brought me back. But the bureaucracy, you know? Am I right? You went through those offices? It’s a miracle anything gets done in that place. And they’ve still got those cases stacked up six, eight high. We’re the lucky ones, I guess. A lot of guys still behind us, you know.”