Book Excerpt: Time On Fire

Excerpt from “Time On Fire: My Comedy of Terrors”

time on fire: my comedy of terrors
c Evan Handler 1996
Published in hardcover by Little, Brown, and Co., 1996.
Published in paperback by Henry Holt, 1997

Chapter II

INITIATION

"Do you think you're going to die of leukemia, Evan?"
It was midnight, my third night in the hospital, and Karen was in a chair pulled close next to my bed. With dark hair framing her doughy face in the light leaking in from the hallway, her head seemed to float in space, making her disembodied whisper all the more eerie. Karen was a nurse on her first break after coming on duty at seven, and she'd promised to stop by to talk with me when she got a chance. This wasn't quite the conversation I had been expecting.
"Well, you might," she said. "A lot of people do, you know. Most who get it, in fact. And there's no point in spending all your energy trying to deny it."
Karen and I had met just a few hours earlier, after I had been told by three or four nurses that I really ought to meet her. "Oh, you and Karen would really get along," they all said.
Maybe they were trying to get back at me, I thought. I had already spent the weekend chafing at fitting myself into the "system" of the hospital, and I thought I felt the nurses losing patience with me. But their system seemed nuts. I was constantly being sent for tests with no warning or information provided to me. A nurse would simply arrive in the room and announce that they were "ready for me."
"They're ready for you at X ray!" they'd sing from my doorway. "Ready for you at nuclear medicine!! Ready for you at sonogram!!!" And I was expected to go. If I asked why a test was needed, I was told that it was needed because they wouldn't treat me without it.
These tests happened in far-off branches of the hospital, reached through long underground tunnels. I'd be met in the hallway near the nurses' station by an "escort," without whom I was forbidden to travel off the floor for my procedures. The nurses demanded that I sit in a wheelchair and be pushed by the escort to wherever it was that they were "ready for me". My first thought was that I'd never again be able to fantasize over the late-night cable television porn ads. I found myself imagining calling one of those escort services and winding up with a wrinkled, old Filipino man pushing a wheelchair ringing my doorbell.
Down in the basement of the hospital, I'd be met by a technician dressed in blue surgical scrubs, giant blue booties, and a blue shower cap. On one of my early trips down, a tiny, fast-talking Korean woman pulled me up out of the wheelchair by the sleeve of my shirt. She dragged me through a small, brightly lit waiting room, past rows of patients who were all dressed in their own blue space outfits. These patients were sitting on hard plastic chairs, and they were each staring at the single white floor tile right in front of their own giant blue feet.
The technician pointed me toward a doorway off this room and, in the most staccato display of human behavior I'd ever seen, she barked at me ferociously. "You go in this room here! You take off all your clothes! You take off all your underwears, too! You put on this robe here! You come back outside this room!"
I stood still, staring at her dumbfounded.
"You come back outside this room! You sit down in this chair here!"
The most amazing thing about this scene was that none of the blue patient people even looked up. No, they all kept staring at the floor right in front of their feet. I was afraid that if I put on those blue clothes, I'd become just like them. I wondered if anyone had ever rebelled. I mean, John Wayne had cancer. Did he put up with this?
Then there were the patients back up on the twelfth floor. The screamers, the limbless, the ghostly. My first roommate, Joel, and his mother. Until early Monday morning -- when his bed was wheeled out and he inexplicably disappeared, never to be seen again -- I'd sat in the room with my family and friends and heard his doctors brusquely charge into the room for their daily visits. On the far side of the curtain they would gruffly lay out absolutely horrifying scenarios and treatment plans in very complex language, then leave and joke and laugh their way down the hall. That was the only thing that stopped Joel and Mom's crazy chatter. After the doctors left they sat in complete silence for ten or fifteen minutes. Mom would then start a one-sided discourse completely twisting and respinning the doctor's report until it was nothing but a fairy-tale version filled with her own fantastic dreams and distortions . If she ever raised any questions about Joel with the doctors or tried to participate in any of the decision making at all she was trampled. Bulldozed by technical terminology and patronizing platitudes until she shut up. Then the doctors would get out of the room fast.
About two-thirds of the other patients I'd seen so far were attached to IV poles whose wheels didn't work. They didn't roll right. I'd watch people, up and down the hall, wrestling with these poles, or coasting out of control until they slammed into the wall. Some of the people had just picked the whole contraption up and were carrying it around with them. But I didn't see anyone fighting back. The few tentative protests that I had made so far, about being pushed in a wheelchair, say, were met by the nurses with chuckles and nods to each other that seemed to say, "Oh, how cute. One of those. We haven't seen one in a long time." Always clear in their communication was that they knew exactly how to deal with my kind.
Just that morning, two nurses had come into my room to make the bed. They were being really friendly, asking me to tell them all about myself. "Oh! An actor. How nice," one of them said. "We've had a lot of actors here."
And the other one said, "Sure, sure. Johnny Cazale died on this floor."

So maybe Karen was my punishment. Sent to torment me into submission and cooperation. She cooed spookily into the darkness. "Are you religious, Evan?" she asked. "Maybe you'd better spend some time thinking...about faith."
Sometime later that night, I don't know how long after I'd fallen asleep, I was startled awake by my new roommate, Robert, crying out. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of his soul. He said, "Hi...," with a combination of wonder and joy and resigned acceptance. Inevitability, that's what I heard him express. And it was terrifying.
My immediate thought was that he was dreaming about meeting someone he had never expected to see again, and that he was being torn away from them at the same instant as the reunion was taking place. And "hi..." was all that he managed to get out before they were gone. Then I thought it sounded as if he might be meeting God. And that was the next thing he said. "God!" I put the pillow over my head. I wondered how a person might create faith in their heart. Was it possible? Could a person will himself to believe in God? To entrust his safety to a universe that had landed him in this situation to begin with?
Earlier that morning I'd received my first mail at the hospital. One of the cards was from a friend of my parents, a woman who had adopted fundamentalist Christianity several years before, after her oldest son was diagnosed as schizophrenic. The card had a colorful painting of Jesus Christ on the front. His expression was warm and friendly, his arms spread open with his palms facing upward in a welcoming gesture. I opened the card, and the printed message said "Only when you accept Jesus Christ as your savior will your soul be safe in the kingdom of Heaven." I closed the card fast. I felt like I'd just received a letter threatening my life. From a close family friend. Or was it being threatened by Jesus Christ himself?
I was really shaken by that card, until I opened the one from my parents' neighbors. A couple whom I used to baby-sit for, and who I still saw a few times every year. Theirs was one of those pop-up cards -- when I opened it, a picture of a bouquet of flowers unfolded toward me. They had written their message in pen down the side. "Dear Evan," it said. "We want you to know we are thinking of you, and we will always remember you." We all had a good laugh over that one. And it made me forget about Jesus threatening my life. For a while.
I began giving more and more thought to what I might depend on to pull me through the months ahead. I realized that, in my nonreligious family, the only faith that had ever been instilled in me, during my childhood, was a faith in myself. Even if I had wanted to respond to Jesus' offer of salvation, it seemed impossible to impose an entirely new set of beliefs on such short notice. But I began to think that if I could find some form of spirituality that relied primarily on me, and on maximizing my own potential, maybe I'd have a shot. I had no idea what form it should take or where it would come from. But, in the hopes that pleas from even the most skeptical souls can be heard in Heaven, I started praying to whatever God might be willing to listen.
* * *
I'd been hearing for days about the "chemo nurses," how great they were, what good hands I'd be in. I couldn't understand why special nurses were needed for the chemotherapy, though. I'd been having my veins punctured for four days already. To leak blood out, to pour liquids in. Some of the vampires were definitely better than others, but why "chemo nurses"?
These women wore special little caps, like what you'd expect to see on nurses in a 1950s movie. They acted pert and spunky, wore their hair in Donna Reed flips, and, in so doing, they almost succeeded in disguising the grave seriousness they brought to the task of correctly identifying the live body in front of them.
One of the team of two took hold of my left wrist with one of her hands. Her other hand gripped my fingers, and, with me effectively immobilized, she positioned the hospital name tag bracelet in front of her face and read my forearm like it was a fortune cookie.
"What is your name?" she asked.
After I told her, the other nurse said, "Now spell it."
This was not Donna Reed anymore. Thinking that they were through with my limb, I sent a message from my brain to what had been my arm to go quietly back by my side. But my arm no longer belonged to me. The chemo nurse held tight and seemed to notice not one bit that I had tried, with a good deal of strength, to reclaim it. She then proceeded to repeat my name herself, repeat the spelling of my name, and read off the patient ID number to her partner, who was checking the information off on pink sheets of paper attached to a clipboard. When I again thought that they were through, the nurses suddenly switched roles, and the one with the clipboard began barking out all the facts over again as the one who held my wrist studied the ID bracelet, mouthing the words silently as she read along.
When the security check was complete the two women popped, like a bubble bursting, back into the Betty Crocker mode. They were asking me about my life, gurgling and fawning over everything I said, as they quickly, gracefully, with military precision, attached tubing and clamps to the IV line already in my arm. They had a system wherein one of them spoke with me, distracted me, while the other performed the intricate mechanical maneuvers. I had the thought that this must be how animals feel, in the moments before they are expertly slaughtered, never having quite enough time to figure out what it is that's being done to them.
My mother and father were in the room with me. We were all extremely apprehensive about the procedure about to take place. On one hand, it was a very welcome event to be getting started in the treatment of the leukemia. On the other hand, we were quivering in nervous anticipation of all the worst side effects that might be right around the corner. We could have guessed about the nausea and the vomiting that would follow. No one had to tell me that my hair would fall out. But what we'd learned about the mechanics of the treatment itself was a frightening shock to all of us.
The chemotherapy agents would be administered over four consecutive days. These drugs, one of them called Ara-C (not a bad name for a sports drink, I thought), and the other 4-DMDR (a character from the Star Wars trilogy?), would severely damage my bone marrow and all blood-making capabilities, wiping out most of my immune system. For that reason, it was expected that I would almost certainly become extremely ill, fairly quickly, with an infection caused by whatever organism got to me first. At that time the doctors would try to make an accurate diagnosis and administer antibiotics before the infections overwhelmed my organs.
Less serious, but more immediately on our minds, was the nurses' repeated caution to immediately tell them if I experienced any burning or tingling sensations while the drugs were being given. This was thanks to Dr. Zweig's imposing recommendation, delivered as an already-made decision, that it would be best for me to receive my chemotherapy, all transfusions, all medications, all electrolyte infusions, through single IV lines inserted into veins in my arms. These lines were plugged in using needles, by IV nurses who made regular rounds, and lasted no more than two or three days before they had to be replaced with a new needle. These same lines were used to draw blood, though not very effectively. Trying to draw blood from one of these peripheral lines often caused a blow-out of the vein, which then required a fresh stabbing to draw blood, as well as another puncture to get a new IV line going.
The alternative to this was to have a Broviac catheter implanted into my chest. This was a permanent tube, one end of which would be inserted into a vein in my neck. The other end of the tube would then be tunneled under my skin until it poked out a small hole in the chest area. The tube then branched off into two smaller ones, and, with two little rubber ports plugged on the ends for sticking the needles into; no more stabbings! Almost all the patients on the floor had these access lines in, and seemed relieved to have them. They and the nurses gave me odd glances when I said that I was going to have my chemo on my arms alone, but Dr. Zweig told me that there would be no problem, that those access lines could get infected, and why increase the risk? Not yet knowing the unusual level of discomfort this portended, even within the harsh context of chemotherapy treatment, I consented to be treated with a minimum of risk, and with a maximum of pain.
So, as the chemo nurses placed a metal carrying case on the bed next to me; and as they opened it and withdrew a large, clear plastic cylinder containing a bright orange liquid that was to be injected into a vein in my left arm -- specifically my left arm, because I'm right-handed -- our fears were of the burning or tingling sensations that I might feel as the chemical was pushed into my veins and into my body. This chemical, if administered very slowly, very carefully, over the course of fifteen minutes for this one tube alone, could glide into the vein and cause only the predictable damage in the expected areas of the body. But if pushed into the vein too quickly, if any leaked out of the vein, or, God forbid, if the needle slipped out of the vein, the chemical would burn and blister the flesh, causing intense pain for months, and leaving permanent scars. As one of the hipper male IV nurses, who'd been around to witness it, had told me, "That shit would tear your ass up."
Jackie had already apologized for her squeamishness and left the room, so it was just me and Mom and Dad. I was terrified, and I think my mother was more so. But, bless her heart, she was staying in the room with me. I knew she wanted to run and hide, that she would have given almost anything to get out of that room. And at any other time in my life I would have lost my temper. I would have scolded her and told her to go ahead and leave if she couldn't hide her agony. But on that day I just wanted her help. Any help she could muster. My mother, trembling and close to tears, was holding my free hand and whispering encouragement to me, as the container of orange chemical was solidly clicked and locked into place at the end of the tube that was connected to the needle that was in my arm.
And that's when the chemo nurse said it.
"You've been to the sperm bank, right, Evan?"
I said, "...Huh?"
The two nurses turned toward each other in what looked like a perfectly choreographed move. They gave a priceless, puzzled glance, and then turned, again in unison, back to me.
The other one spoke. She addressed me slowly, drawing out each syllable, as if I suffered from the most severe of mental disabilities. "Evan, didn't your doctor tell you about the sperm bank?"
I answered her with the same controlled exasperation. "No. No, he didn't. Is there something I need to know about the sperm bank?"
This time they didn't look at each other. With the swiftness and urgency of a bomb squad team they clicked and pulled and had the orange cylinder detached from my arm. The cylinder went back into the metal carrying case labeled "Biohazard," the two picnic basket-type lids were slammed shut, and the box was picked up off the bed and placed on a table several feet away.
"We'll be right back," one of the nurses said, and they turned and left the room. A split second later the other one reappeared, grabbed the biohazardous metal picnic basket, and fled once again.
My mother was still holding my hand.

And so I was welcomed into the wild and wacky world of sperm-banking. I was issued a pass that allowed me to leave the hospital. Insurance regulations had prohibited my leaving the hospital at all until now, under the assumption that anyone well enough to go outside and breathe fresh air is not sick enough to necessitate payment for a hospital room. That's a rule that continued through all my hospitalizations in New York. No matter how beneficial the sunshine might have been, how therapeutic a walk around the block might have seemed, the only place to be outdoors was on a ten-foot-wide terrace on the fifteenth floor of a building holding eighteen floors of people.
Jackie and I left the hospital, and we headed for the sperm bank -- on Madison Avenue. Nothing but the best address for my progeny. Along the way we had our first taste of the disturbing realization that everything in the world was just as it had been five days ago. New York City, and certainly the world beyond, didn't seem to have any interest in the devastation that we were in the midst of, or any awareness at all of the teeming, seething society inside the building that we had just left. We started joking about the absurdity of walking around the streets of Manhattan with a deadly disease and played with the idea of going to the airport and getting on a plane. Paris, perhaps. Definitely Europe, somewhere. Maybe if we went someplace where we were unknown, where there was no history, then the whole situation would vanish along with our old identities.
I also had the first notion of the depth of trust that I was being forced to give to an entire community of strangers. State-certified as they might be, those doctors and nurses and pharmacists and technicians, they were still unknown to me. And this was my life on the line. My existence. My confidence in them was a suspicious one at best, and my confidence in the state that regulated them was somewhat lower than that.
Call it denial, and I guess that's what it was, but as we reached the IDANT Andrology Laboratories on Madison Avenue I had the additional thought that it was at least possible that I didn't have anything seriously wrong with me at all. Maybe no one inside Sloan-Kettering really had a disease. How many of them had been shown the slides of their abnormal tissues? Shown the slides, been taught how to understand them, how to compare them to normal tissues, and been satisfied enough to allow strangers to carve them up or administer lethal doses of toxic chemicals? I hadn't. What if this was the way that the medical establishment, the government, did its research? Its experimentation. Take every forty or fiftieth person who walks in the door, tell them they have a dread disease, and get them into the laboratory, the torture chamber, of their own free will. For their own benefit. I'd read news accounts of governments doing things just as diabolical in the past. My paranoia felt not only justified to me, but wise. Maybe we were all just being good little citizens and doing as we were told. Just remove your jewelry, drop your clothes in the bin, and have a nice hot shower before we assign you a bunk.
At IDANT I was given a clipboard by a woman dressed in white standing behind a window. There were forms to be filled out before I could open my bank account. I didn't realize I was staring into space until I heard Jackie say, "Sweetie? Sweetie, are you all right?"
I looked up at her, and with my IDANT-supplied pencil poised, I asked, "How do you spell 'leukemia?'"
Jackie spelled the word for me, slowly, and then I said, "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
Back at the window, the woman in white handed me a small plastic container with a lid. She told me that I was to go into room number three, "produce" a specimen, and, without touching the inside of the container or contaminating the specimen in any way, "deposit" it in the cup, and bring it back to the window. She then gave me a key on a ring with a large plastic "3" attached to it, handed me a thick manila folder, and called, "Next!"
I was tempted to ask her how I was supposed to "produce" the specimen, but I resisted, and the question that I didn't really need to ask was answered when I got inside room number three. After struggling with the giant key chain I opened the door, and I was met with a gust of freezing cold air. Inside the tiny refrigerated room was a simple metal folding chair, a miniature three-legged side table, and a box of tissues. I sat down in the chair and put the manila folder on my lap. I must have been terribly unsophisticated in the ways of sperm-banking, but I had no idea what I had been given in the folder. When I opened it and found about a dozen pornographic magazines, I was stunned. Then I giggled.
Did they subscribe, I wondered? Or was it someone's job to go shopping periodically, to keep the supply varied and up-to-date?
I was really interested in checking out the magazines. I like pornography, I find it fascinating. And not that it doesn't turn me on, it does. But in addition to that, I'm always astonished by the idea of people making really hard-core pornography. Who they are, what it was like there at the time, how it felt to them. And there was some really hard-core stuff in there. All mixed in with the Playboy and the Oui. There were the Juggs, the Beaver, the Ass Fuckers.
I was actually a little bit thrilled with the magazines in my lap. I still haven't gotten over a certain adolescent relationship to pornography. A kind of substitution fantasy that turns the book, and my feelings toward it, into something very much like those I'd have toward a woman. There have been times that I've stopped not very far short of setting a candle-lit dinner table for myself and a magazine. It's probably magnified by the fact that I never got over my inhibitions surrounding buying the stuff or about being open and shameless about my interest in it. Maybe this confession will help. Either that, or six more years of therapy.
And, Jackie was with me. We had decided to try and make sperm-banking fun, and to try not to lose touch with our sex life, by having Jackie help me to jerk off into the cup, inside the refrigerated room, on Madison Avenue. Very sexy.
Jackie took off her shirt, and instantly broke out into the most extreme case of goose bumps I had ever seen. As we started to fool around in that room, I wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

Jackie and I had fallen in love quickly, about a year before, in a small town in the Catskill Mountaintans. How appropriate for two Jews. But this wasn't the Borscht Belt Catskills. Tannersville was a rustic, small town that came alive only during the winter, when the local ski mountain became a prime destination for thousands of New Yorkers.
We met in the summer, when a theater company that we were both involved with held its annual artists' retreat. I had come up as a result of having met a woman named Rachel through mutual friends after one of my last performances in a play called Found a Peanut, at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. Rachel and I decided to rent a car and share a ride up to Tannersville.
At least, that's what I thought we'd decided. Upon arriving I found myself immediately infatuated with the slim, wavy-haired, blond woman exercising on the front lawn. Jackie was dressed in dark blue sweat pants that had shrunk enough to show off her still girlish athleticism. I followed her up the steps to the porch, smitten by just the sight of her, and when she turned to face me and I saw her blue eyes smiling at me from her adorably lopsided face, I felt like I'd been away on a trip somewhere and had just returned home. Jackie said "Hello," giggled, and disappeared. For the rest of that afternoon I fantasized about how I might get to speak with her, as I was relentlessly pursued by my driving companion. Unknown to me, as I had parked the car, Rachel had responded to the innkeeper's inquiry as to whether we were a couple requiring a shared room with a simple "not yet."
The tension mounted through the weekend as I maneuvered my way into private walks and talks with Jackie, trying not to insult anyone in the process. I wasn't being coy or rude. While I certainly suspected that Rachel was interested in me, nothing had been spoken. I felt it would have been presumptuous of me to explain a lack of interest to a woman who hadn't actually communicated any to me yet. At least not in a way that I was capable of understanding at that time in my life. Acknowledging my own attractiveness to a woman who might pursue it aggressively was way beyond my limitations at twenty-three years old.
The climax, or lack of one, came on an oppressively humid night during Mario Cuomo's keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I was lying facedown, with no shirt on, in my room of the Forest Inn, with Rachel on a chair facing me. My denial could not have been more complete. Rachel stared at me longingly, offering conversation, and making gallant attempts to rekindle the flirtation that I was able to engage in only while swimming in a large group, as we had been the night we met in Manhattan. I, meanwhile, was straining furiously to hear Cuomo's voice delivering his rousing speech, as it floated across the hall from a small clock radio next to Jackie's bed, where I wanted to be. I listened to that speech as if I was in the room with her. I raised the volume of my comments, my oohs and aahs and groans of appreciation, my breathing, all in the attempt to share that night with her, to use Mario and his vision of the future to connect us, and to fuse one of our own, together. Weeks and months later Jackie and I joked that Rachel would have to be invited to our wedding.

Now, in our cozy IDANT cubicle, Jackie was being every bit the ultimate of what someone in my position could hope for. Until my diagnosis, however, our relationship, after one year, had reached a point of stasis, and I had begun to feel dissatisfied. Our lovemaking, up to this point, had been deeply affectionate, but hardly uninhibited, and the frequency had tapered off, at times to the point where I would wonder if Jackie was even still attracted to me. But I was well aware that I was going to need a sturdy support system for what lay ahead, and both my fear of abandonment and Jackie's startling devotion had caused me to reexamine my doubts. When she offered to spice up the sperm-banking expedition I was moved, I was more than happy, even if a little bit self-conscious, and I welcomed her gift. I also didn't feel like I had the right to turn her down. In any case, it became excruciatingly clear to me that I was about to have one of the most intimate sexual encounters of my life, inside a locked closet, with strange men masturbating for medical purposes on either side of me.
Coming into a cup is not easy. I was surprised to learn that, then surprised that I was surprised, because I had surely never tried it before, so how could I know? It's not so much the simple act of hitting a target with an ejaculation, though I'm not sure that's really so simple either, but the repeated instructions "...not to touch the inside of the cup, in any way!" that posed problems. Especially when combined with the warning that "...the greatest number of sperm are contained in the first spurt." Who would have known? The woman in white at the window, that's who.
I was lying on my side, on blue industrial carpeting, with my pants around my knees. I was clutching the all-too-small plastic specimen jar in my left hand, holding it close to, but not touching, my penis, as I masturbated frantically and felt an orgasm approaching. My mind was soaring, my surroundings spinning in and out of my awareness, as I struggled to give myself over to pleasure in this situation.
After all, orgasms feel good. And that became a problem. I was not having fun, I hated where I was, my reason for being there was catastrophic, and nothing had happened to me over the past week that was not demeaning and humiliating. I was on my last outing from an existence of torture that was about to begin, having my last free moments before a time of great physical pain, and, as my body went rigid and convulsed, I came into the cup, thinking only of the story to be told to my children one day of how they came to be.
My children, who were dripping down the inside of the jar. My children, who were mostly in the first spurt.
I exhaled slowly, deeply. I got my breathing back under control, all the while refusing to grant life to the groan of pleasure and release that was reaching up and out from inside my chest. I had a momentary image flash through me of what it would be like if God became a rapist, and that perhaps that was what He had just done to me.
Back outside room number three there was a line of men, containers in hand, waiting to get to the woman in the window. I was fourth or so from the front, glad to be that far back, because my greatest wish at that moment was that the semen in the cup would cool off before I had to hand it over. Blood, somehow, would be different. Urine, slightly humbling. I had, in the past, handed over stool specimens, still warm in their waxed cardboard containers that so resemble those in which take-out food is packed up, and felt embarrassed. Nothing though, for me, can match the emasculatory glory of standing with four other men; a fresh, hot ejaculate in hand; waiting to hand it over to a stranger; a woman, in uniform; who then proceeds to place the now-sealed plastic container on a scale, and weigh it.
That's right, the specimen is handed over, and, in full view of all the others in line, its weight is checked and announced, just like at the weigh-in before a boxing match. The weight is then recorded in a giant, hardcover book, and that is how the fee for storage is determined. I wondered if any of the other men had the same instinctive urge as I did to applaud one another as each weight was announced, to cheer each other in our accomplishment, having produced these massive specimens, as only a man can do. "Weighing in at just under two ounces!"
Instead, we all waited quietly, staring down at the white lids to our tiny plastic jars. Each here for his own secret reason. Each one hoping someday to reach back in time, from a better future, and to thaw out a piece of himself, preserved intact from how he was today.

Time On Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
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