***This partial journal was discovered beneath the ribcage of a mummified corpse in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. The skeleton shows traumatic ***This partial journal was discovered beneath the ribcage of a mummified corpse in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. The skeleton shows traumatic indications of having been dropped from a great height, either from an airplane, hot air balloon (Agent Cobbledick’s theory), or a helicopter (My theory). Most of the journal had been eaten by desert creatures, and the limb bones of this unfortunate man were scattered across the desert floor for some distance. The corpse has been identified as Jeffrey D. Keeten. We must thank the Hibernaculum for providing the DNA that was instrumental in identifying the body. At first we thought the journal was an excerpt from the cult classic Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle, and when we shared some of the entries on the remaining pages with the writer over a secure phone line he was at first intrigued.
We wanted to meet with Doyle so he could examine the documents in person, but that proved to be impossible. Because of radical elements who find Doyle’s book to be an abomination, he has been forced into hiding in an undisclosed location. He emphatically denied that the writing was his or that he’d ever known anyone named Keeten. The deceased has proved to be an enigma with no discernible friends and a marginal social media presence. His wife is doing a 120 day stint in the Hibernaculum and is unavailable for comment.***
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY AUGUST 17TH, 2045, STARDATE -277374.2216197361
”I put it to her that studies reveal that happy people are less likely to hibernate. So it’s basically about escape? Respite for the unfulfilled? ‘Our research shows that the issue is a lot more complex than that. First off, nobody is happy forever, right? And yes, a lot of our Hibernators are in here because they don’t want to be out there. But others, as I’m sure you will find out for yourself today, come here on principle. Remember, the Hibernaculum’s main motivation is ecological. People see hibernation as a win-win way to reduce their environmental footprint. This cannot be overstated. Environ-mental concerns are paramount to our Hibernators. You see, time spent hibernating converts into liters of water, kilos of grain, heads of slaughter cattle, cubic inches of emissions, parts-per-million of toxins all spared. That’s very important to our Sleepers. That’s why we’re here: to take a load off the world.’” From Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle.
My wife has decided to be swallowed by the White Whale.
I swing my window open and peer out at the monstrosity, visible from my book-lined ivory tower. The glare off the white dome hurts my eyes. I put my sunglasses on. “So this is what’s going to eat my wife?” I mutter. I point my gnarled arm at the hump on the horizon. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying whale!”
I crack myself up.
While snooping, I found this treatise on Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle hidden, as if she were afraid I’d see her reading, between the cushions of her reading couch. This was shortly after she informs me at breakfast, sans toast, that she has signed up for the 120 day deluxe package. She was so nervous about revealing her plans to me that she forgot to toast my rye bread. I was distracted by the yellow swirls of egg yolk left on my plate, so it took me a few seconds to focus on what she was telling me. The dawning realization was terrifying.
“You’re leaving me?” I said petulantly. I was already calculating how her being gone was going to adversely affect my daily existence.
She patted my silver mane and kissed my prodigious forehead. “You’re getting an upgrade. I’ll come back to you as a new woman.”
When she left the room, I licked my plate, my mind swirling like a pinball machine on tilt.
As it turns out, the wife is having a few things “done” while she is sleeping in the dome. She is having some strategic Cryolipolysis performed, cataracts removed, toes straightened, wrinkles smoothed away, neck wattle discarded, and her ass lifted. Recovery time, instead of enduring pain while awake in the real world, will be spent…asleep.
I begrudgingly have to admit that it makes a lot of sense. But what about me and my needs!!! I suggested a Japanese nanny of the cock twitching inspiring variety, but the wife laughed so hard she started choking, and for a moment I thought she was going to kick the can before she could check herself into the oversized cannikin.
Okay, so Doyle makes some good points about why someone should donate four months of their life out of a year to help save the planet. Here is the elevator pitch: "Look, the time has come for drastic measures. Flash floods, warmed oceans, coral dieback, deforestation changing climate patterns, melting icecaps, rising seas, areas that were once tropical forest turned to scrubland, reefs bleached to hell, microplastics in absolutely every nook and cranny of every single biome. Pandemics one year, heatwaves the next. It’s no joke. All the shit they said would happen is now happening. Nearly 8 billion people on the planet, and almost 5 of those are living on the verge, or in the pit, of abject poverty. The insects are dying out, and without insects, there’s no pollination, and so no food. We're running out of water, and without water, guess what? There's no food. It takes up to five thousand liters of freshwater to produce one person's daily food intake. That’s 75 billion liters a day in this city alone. Two-thirds of the world's population is already affected by critical water shortages. We need to start cutting back, blah-blah-blah, which is why I am giving away 120 days of my life. By living off an IV drip and vitamins for 17 weeks, I'll save the world well over twelve thousand liters of safe freshwater.”
Sigh!!!
The thing is, I don’t like sleeping. I wouldn’t sleep at all except for the resulting fatigue and the fact that I know my brain needs time to shuffle through all the crap I stuff into it every day. Secondly, and maybe this should be firstly, I don’t trust governments, and I trust corporations even less. I’m feeling rather nauseous as I make my way through Doyle’s novel. Is this even a novel? Environmental manifesto? Scientific dissertation? Erotic piece of titillation? What the fuck is this, really? One moment I’m reading about someone’s experience in hibernation, the next paragraph I’m reading about the Marquis De Sade’s stimulating debauchery of some consenting lady’s orifices. Okay, so the asides, which are what we’ll call the moments when Doyle wanders away from the picnic basket into the tropical jungle, are, and I really hate to say this,…very interesting.
Let's leave the 18th century in the past and focus upon this horrifying present that threatens to turn my life upside down.
Here’s one of Doyle’s Kool-aid drinking characters giving the hard sell. “People see hibernation as a win-win way to reduce their environmental footprint. This cannot be overstated. Environ- mental concerns are paramount to our Hibernators. You see, time spent hibernating converts into liters of water, kilos of grain, heads of slaughter cattle, cubic inches of emissions, parts-per-million of toxins all spared. That’s very important to our Sleepers. That’s why we’re here: to take a load off the world.” And put a load in the bank? “We’re a company. We want our contribution to society to be profitable so that it can be sustainable. And yes, our share-holders expect returns. Look, they’d much rather make money saving the environment than destroying it.”
Yeah, yeah, my wife is a sucker for any environmental tear bath. She wept over the ratty specimen of the Oxford Dodo at the Ashmolean Museum. She stormed out of an exclusive restaurant in Tokyo that was serving a dolphin entree. Okay, so her empathy is part of why I love her, especially when her empathy extends to me. Not that I don’t recognize the colossal size of the world’s problems, but I’m old. I’ve climbed the ladder, and now I’m in the slippery-slide time of my life and imagine my surprise once I stumbled into my seventies to find out someone greased the glide.
The thing that keeps thundering through my paranoid brain is that, during the time I’m in the White Whale taking a snooze, some rich asshole is going to have a skiing accident that ruptures his kidneys, and the hibernaculum just happens to have a perfect match.
“Why do I have a scar that I didn’t have before?”
“Why, Mr. Keeten, we have no idea? Are you sure you didn’t have that scar from before? You are 78 years young, and haha, we all know the older we get that some sand starts to leak out of the hour glass.”
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY AUGUST 18TH, 2045, STARDATE -299371.3462709284
I take the wife to drop her off at the White Whale. As you may have noticed from the date of my Journal entry, she gave me very little notice of this momentous decision. She’s nearly giddy, and as a final indignity I have to listen to her flirt with the Ferryman, though I was pleasantly distracted by some of the recently “refreshed” women on the far shore who were wolf whistling at the boatman and liberating their boobs as enticements of future delights. I was a not-so-innocent bystander of their attention, but I must say I still enjoyed the show. I even felt a little flutter in my lackluster flag.
The wife had to bend my fingers back so she could pry the ancient coin from my hand to pay the Ferryman. I’ve never seen her so aggressive. At the insistence of my wife, I was being forced to part with one of my Philip II of Macedonia coins from about 340 BCE with Apollo on one side and a trident on the other. The Ferryman grinned as he bit the coin between his oversized, menacingly white teeth to make sure it was real gold. My blood pressure spiked, and my bowels spasmed. I was so distracted with dying that I barely had the wherewithal to enjoy the fat tongue my wife stuck in my mouth. If she’s this excited going in, what will I have to deal with when she comes back out?
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY October 24th, 2045, STARDATE -299187.7545027905
I’m being sent to a rehabilitation camp, i.e. jail. Maybe I’ll get cell block C.3.3. like Oscar Wilde. Hardy har har! It seems that mounting an assault on The White Whale to liberate my wife is against the law. I accused them of kidnapping. They accused me of disturbing the peace and plotting to blow up the Hibernaculum. I may have said in a moment of pique that I had a bomb, but really does that make any sense? I can’t blow up the White Whale as long as my wife is trapped within its confines. Maybe I might be tempted to launch a well-thrown harpoon. Sigh!! Queequeq I’m not. Though I am considering a few prison tattoos. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve become Ahab which would be simply unacceptable because I’ve always sided with The Whale.
I hope there are books at this place.
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY December 16th, 2045, STARDATE -299042.5490233383
So the powers-that-be release me mere minutes before my wife is due to be liberated. Despite hiring a phalanx of expensive lawyers, I am not able to extract myself any sooner. In an ironic moment after sentencing, I asked to be allowed to hibernate for the duration of my confinement, and my petition was denied. The long arm of hibernaculum kept me tucked away in a six by eight cell with only an illiterate, nose-pickin’, fog-fartin’ Appalachian ridgerunner for company. For the duration of my sentence, the trundling prison book trolley only disgorged ratty copies of Reader’s Digest condensed books to read. It was as bad for my brain chemistry as reading Young Adult books for four months. My brain has definitely atrophied.
Before disembarking back on Terra Firma and back to reality, my wife pets the Ferryman, and she’s not alone. Most of the females and even some of the males want to feel his bulging muscles before they return to their former lives. It made me want to hurl prison food all over his boat which, due to the high premium put on animal protein, would consist of masticated ants, grasshoppers, and crickets.
The wife chatters to me like some kind of reanimated version of herself from decades ago, which I guess for all intents and purposes she is. She looks younger, trimmer, and bounces around me like Scarlett Johansson in a Woody Allen movie. I could measure in minutes how long it will take me to drain the edge off of her wonderful mood.
I sulk all the way home. She doesn’t even notice. She is too busy exclaiming about how blue the sky is and how green the grass is and how the cauliflower shaped clouds are really unicorns, flying turtles, and adorable fornicating rabbits. She shakes my arm and while grinning from ear to ear asks me, “Are you still the same delightful, grumpy, old fusspot?”
Oh Zeus, explode me with a thunderbolt now!
She’s already talking about going back into the belly of the whale. She even has the date circled on her phone calendar. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. My stint of incarceration did nothing to dispel my feelings about the government or corporations, but it also showed to me in stark terms that they already have me under their thumb, so why not just go with the flow and sleep away my feelings of anxiety, depression, and addiction to tentacle porn.
Hibernaculum…here I come, well, if they’ll still have me.
I’ve read Anthony Doyle’s book a few times, sifting his words for wisdom or words of warning. Sure it was dystopia back in 2023, but in 2045 it's just a manual for the modern world. If I were able to speak to readers back in 2023, I’d say, be prepared, read this book, erect monuments to Anthony Doyle the oracle…the seer…the soothsayer…the prophet. Most importantly, buy his book so he’ll write more books.
Next month, the New Yorker is printing an article I wrote about my trials and tribulations with Hibernaculum. I’m really just waiting for that phone call from some executive offering me a pile of cabbage to forgo the article. Heehee I’ve become quite the entrepreneur in my twilight years.
I hear the whoop of a helicopter, and there has been a crash downstairs. I suppose I better go see if the cat has knocked the butter dish off the table again. By Odin’s Watery Eye; it sounds like jackboots on the stairs. Those fucking…....more
”You don’t have to be very smart to figure that it only takes one infected individual from Vietnam, or Thailand, or Cambodia, to fly into London, New ”You don’t have to be very smart to figure that it only takes one infected individual from Vietnam, or Thailand, or Cambodia, to fly into London, New York, or Paris, and you’ve sown the seed. In this modern age of air travel, we really do live in a global village. And we’ve created the perfect incubators for breeding and passing on infection, in the buses and planes and underground trains we travel on. We were a human disaster waiting to happen.”
What makes this novel compelling to me more than anything else isn’t the fact that it is about a pandemic, but because it was turned down by publishers in 2005 because the premise of a London locked down due to a virus was inconceivable to the publishers. The idea was improbable...nay impossible.
In 2005, Peter May was not the bestselling author we know today, but a fledgling novel writer, trying to make the transition from screenwriting to full-time fiction writing. He was baffled that, despite the extensive research he could share with them showing that a pandemic could happen on the scale that is depicted in his novel, publishers simply refused to believe it was possible.
This is rather amusing considering the fact that, as I write my thoughts on this novel, we are all in various stages of quarantine.
May’s conception of the future is not improbable or impossible, but very much a presentiment of a very real future that has become our present reality.
I did struggle at first with the book, maybe because we have all become some level of experts on pandemics. I have a bad feeling our collective knowledge will have several more opportunities to increase in the near future. Detective Jack MacNeil is investigating some bones found in a satchel at a construction site. Normally, bones found in such circumstances are more the province of a archaeologist, but given the age of the satchel, it is clear this is a modern murder. MacNeil’s marriage has disintegrated. He is on the verge of retirement, as yet not sure what a post-retirement world in a post-apocalyptic world will look like. 25% of people are getting the virus, and upwards of 80% are dying from it. It is the very worst of times without the reassurement from Dickens that these are also the very best of times.
With so many people dying, it seems almost ridiculous to be investigating the potential murder of one little girl. It reminds me of the TV series Foyle’s War; millions are dying from the ravages of war, and yet here is this man in England investigating Agatha Christie-type murders in a world gone mad. (view spoiler)[As the plot unspools, we soon learn that this little girl might be the critical tie to everything that has happened. So my mild irritation with this subplot in the course of all the madness is ill-considered. (hide spoiler)]
This large Scotsman has an improbable secret relationship with Amy Wu. A petite Asian woman, a forensic orthodontist bound to a wheelchair, who quickly becomes as immersed in the backstory of the bones as MacNeil. She is my favorite character in the book. The descriptions of the creative ways she has made her life as normal as possible despite her handicaps is truly inspiring. The characters are struggling with many of the questions that we have been struggling with in recent months.
”’We shouldn’t do this,’ he said. ‘I might give you the flu. I’m more exposed than you are.’
‘Then we might as well stop living now, because we’ll die anyway.’ Amy gazed up at him. ‘And if we don’t live life while we can, then we’ll die without ever having lived.’”
Just like the creative ways that Amy has made her life better despite circumstances beyond her control, we, too, have to figure out how to live our lives as fully as we can without endangering our lives and the lives of others. I’ve seen a lot of impatience for things to return to normal, but things may never be normal again, or Covid-19 might disappear like the influenza epidemic in 1917, but regardless, we have to understand that this epidemic might only be a dress rehearsal for something nastier. As the quote to begin this review states, we have created the perfect means for destroying ourselves. Maybe we will discover that the speed of travel is not worth the risk. Maybe we will discover things that are more important to us than running around like chickens with our heads cut off. (Yes, I’ve seen that phenomena first hand. My grandmother had her own hand guillotine to behead the next contribution to her stew pot.) I still have hope that in this new world people will rediscover armchair traveling through the magical realm of books. Peter May, for one, will be happy to guide people through the Hebrides or to China or Italy or through a pandemic.
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