Another person down the hall was Cathy. She, too, had suffered from cancer; breast cancer in her case.

“I had always been so healthy. I really was. No milk, no fluoride, no nightshades.”

(Many of these people really wanted to talk to me. They were in sort of a perfect storm of having had health problems, being bored, and having few others to talk to. And I was willing to listen. There wasn’t much else to do, at that point.)

“I had a distance doc I timed with occasionally, but it was a shaman at a festival in Mexico who first diagnosed me. He was the first person who noticed something was wrong, and he did it before even I really knew. I felt fine. I had driven out there with my boyfriend. That was – well, he was seventeen years younger than I was, the boyfriend. People thought that was odd, you know. He was twenty-four. He was barely younger than my daughter, actually. But he treated me so well. I always looked young for my age, I have to say. Honestly, you know.

“Anyway this shaman, it wasn’t even at a ceremony of his that he noticed my illness; nothing like that. I was just holding a crescent lunge with eagle arms by a spring, a pool fed by a spring, when he came up and told me that he sensed a disturbance in me.

“I assumed he meant that I was under stress, which I was – for one thing, my pressure points had been drifting for three moons, at that point – but actually he meant the cancer. He just, noticed it. He was so good. Many cats can do that too, you know. If you watch them, if you really observe them, they can tell you all sorts of things.

“He invited me to a beach near his home, to heal. He said there was a bungalow there I could stay in. He was at his home, his camp, with his people. He had a lot of people always attached to him. They could sense his – power. He was very good. Danny didn’t want me to go. He was jealous, you know, and he had an ideology about the shaman. Danny hadn’t quite yet matured the way he would. The way he must have. I really wonder what happened to him, how he turned out. When he was older; my age. I want to try to find out. Suleiman said that Danny was welcome to come along, and stay in the bungalow, but he didn’t want to. He said he wanted to keep working his job, even though Suleiman said we could come by and get everything we needed at the camp with everyone else.

“Well, the sea didn’t work, unfortunately. It would have worked, but there wasn’t enough time. The cancer was advancing too fast. So a man at the camp who was on his way out told me, he told me this while he was packing up his car to leave, that I should try going into suspension. He said the pod would either keep me alive until there was a cure, or else it might clear up the cancer on its own. Of course. I don’t need to tell you. And here I am, here we are. You’re so quiet.”

Many, many people like this hung out in that building, and wandered the streets. There seemed to be a surge of revivals going on, but no one I met there knew why. I wondered about it as I got to know my surroundings, but didn’t manage to talk to anyone about it in depth for a couple weeks.

I didn’t have much to do – basically nothing at all – and yet we weren’t given any direction about where we might go and what we might do as we awaited further instructions. I had the apartment, and food was delivered to it regularly, which of course was good but took away any need to get anything done.

One place to go was a catch-all social services building, evidently geared to us – the revived – which was called the Medlife office. There were a few beleaguered workers in there, toiling away at their video-game desks or whatever they were, just like those of the couple people I had spoken to the day I climbed out of my case; but the lines to see them were too long. The place had a cavernous waiting room in which you had to take a number – an actual hard copy number printed on a little slip, which surprised me – and wait. The one time I went, my number was 3,056 and they were calling only number 422.

I had actually sat down anyway to wait, but then I noticed that everyone else there was holding one of the postcards that were used to communicate with, evidently, all of us. I was next to a forlorn woman and asked her about hers.

“Ohithink you need it,” she said. “Youjuscame without one? Norder?”

“No order, no,” I said. “I just thought I’d see what they might tell me. Any updates.”

“Updatesonlyonthe cards.”

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She spoke very quickly, obviously, but I understood her. She was Black, and younger than many of the others. Like me, in that regard.

“When are you from?” I asked her.

“Twenty Ninety.”

“Well then, I didn’t miss you by too long.”

“You’re older than that.”

“Yes.”

“You do sound a little old-fashioned. Pardonmysangso.”

“No worries. Why did you enter into stasis, back then?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. My family did it for me, or somebody. I don’t remember.”

“Same with me.”

“There’s a few of us like that,” she said. “More than a few. I hope you can find out what happened. I hope I can find out too.”

*

I also spent time along the lake waterfront. There was a promenade there, and several parks. The weather was cold, but not bitter, so I could walk around for much of the day. And I did strike up a few short conversations with local people there – “local” meaning local to this time, i.e. not more revived persons like me – but they seemed reticent. The clothes I had been provided, along with the apartment and food, were plain, mostly browns and grays, and we returned folks stood out for that reason.

“I hope I’m not, we’re not, a burden on your system,” I told one man. “It seems like there are a lot of us being brought back. In my day, this many new people might have been hard to accommodate. Like refugees.”

He waved this off.

“Oh no, no. Yih’re all welcome here. Taking some time to find useful things for all of yih to do. It’ll come, though. Fiwereyou I’d just enjoy my time out of that case. Breathe in the air.”

“What do you do?”

“I run a bar. With mih wife.”

“There are still bars.”

“Oh yes.”

He just looked out over the lake. I asked:

“Are you from here? Toronto?”

“Oh yeah. Grew up right around here.”

That seemed to be all; he said no more. He didn’t ask me where I was from, or when, or what I had done for a living. He seemed bored, not curious at all about this two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old in front of him.

*

I didn’t try to find his bar, but there would often be a sort of mobile one down by the water, which handed out drinks to me for free. I tried not to over-indulge or take advantage.

It consisted of very large kegs mounted on a platform, surrounded by stools. The thing was mounted on small wheels, and it had some sort of silent propulsion that allowed the driver/bartender to move it around as she walked alongside.

I had watched customers sidle up to it, get their drinks, and either seat themselves on the stools or wander down toward the water to other benches for a couple days. Each person would wave a small disk, like a poker chip, toward the bartender’s pulpit on the thing after taking their drink from her; this was obviously how they paid. I had no such chip, but after a couple days of watching this just approached the woman.

“I’m one of the revived,” I said. “As I’m sure you can tell.”

“Indeed. Welcome back.”

“Thanks – so I see people getting drinks here. You know, the city has given us everything we need, but I don’t have one of those chips everyone seems to pay you with.”

“Connects, we call them. No problem for you folks, though. What will you have?”

“You still have beer,” I told her.

“Been around for five thousand years, at least,” she said. “Not something that’s going away anytime soon.”

She turned back to her taps, not making any further eye contact with me although there were no other customers around. She had a tattoo across her knuckles – it may have been a stylized snake – that I almost asked about, just for the sake of conversation, but I decided against it.

So I would get a beer which I could open-carry along the Toronto waterfront during the day as the temperature rocketed up into the forties. I tried to make small talk with some of the people I saw around, but none of them wanted to talk. A guy standing next to his bike, two women on a break from their offices, an older man walking a dog – none of them wanted to talk.

There were other revived people down there – we stood out due to our clothes, again – and I had much more luck with them. I guess the native Torontonians just saw too many of us to want to bother. The days wore along, and I continued to wait to be assigned something to do.

*

One day while I was in my apartment there was a knock, which was rare. I opened the door. Outside in the hall stood a young Asian man. He wore denim – always in style, apparently – and a beard and mustache. His eyes looked knowing and friendly.

“Great-times-seven Grandfather,” he said.

“What?”

He smiled, bobbed his head, and explained.

“Perry Doran. I am your great grandson, times seven. They told me yih’ve been awoken.”