Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

was just the undergraduates who wanted to be visible. I watched these scenes all weekend from my windowsill, like a distracted cat. Unafraid, vigilant.

On the Saturday morning I woke up at 4 a.m., fully alert. Not knowing what else to do, I walked mindlessly along my corridor and up the stairs to Deb’s room. I knocked on her door. In the blanket silence that followed, I stared at her name, tracing over each letter with my eyes. D. Orton. Here, at least, that was still her name. Everyone living in College has their name hand-painted onto a little black panel over their door, even undergraduates. Surname and initial, in perfectly uniform, subtly gothic white lettering. Thin horizontal lines and a rather serious serif. The lettering would appear and disappear as if by magic whenever students changed rooms. You could sometimes see the calligrapher’s guide lines at the top and bottom where they hadn’t been fully erased. I stared at the letters, clung to their presence as if they were still attached to Deb by some invisible thread.

I had slipped into being semi-nocturnal, preferring the openness of nights when the streets weren’t crammed with tourists, and much less social interaction was expected of me just by virtue of having ventured outside of my room. The more drunk people were, the easier I found it to watch them without feeling obligated to engage in any way. Late at night, one could still find cheap food near the College at Gardies or the Trailer of Life, so despite a chronic lack of funds I started eating more (though not better), even putting on a little weight. Beyond the “Life Van,” across the market square, was another institution known unaffectionately as the “Death Van,” where a heap of empty fat and carbs was even cheaper and even more disgustingly indigestible. Life and death. Eat and shit. Since losing Deb, everything hurt so badly I didn’t know how I could bear it. But somehow I had to keep it all moving.

On the Sunday, as I was heading back to my room very late with a half-eaten bag of chips in my left hand, my right hand reached out automatically to rap on Deb’s door. Then the hand froze in place, knuckles just inches from contact with the wooden panel. A chill flowed slowly backwards from the knuckles, as if the blood inside the hand were being replaced with something else, something dense and thick, an icy slush.

Dr. Humberton’s voice was replaying in my mind. Something from his lecture. From the day Deb went missing.

“Suppose when you die your body is cryogenically frozen…”

Here he had turned his back to us, rolling his crisp white shirt sleeves up to begin a drawing on the blackboard. A stick figure, lying flat inside a big rectangle labelled –130°C.

“…and then three hundred years later this body is successfully resuscitated.”

A second stick figure, this one standing. An arrow from the first figure to the second. Under the arrow, 300 years.

“Now, in this thought experiment, humanity is capable of preserving a viable human body in a frozen state for much longer than the span of a normal human life. But here is your question: is the person preserved? That is another issue entirely. Who—or should I say what—is it that wakes up after the big defrost?”

In front of Deb’s door, the slush that had been injected into my arm was still moving, forcing its way into the rest of my system. As it reached my brain and filled the space behind my eyes, I finally registered what I must have unconsciously seen. What had prevented me from knocking. I dropped my chips all over the floor and ran back to my room.

The thin, white gothic lettering over Deb’s door said F. Jameson.

—

On the Monday, exam results began to appear. Class lists on thick cream A4 cardstock were pinned up naked inside a glass box outside the Senate House. Come and see: every student’s shame or pride displayed to the world. As brutal as blood on white sheets. Undeniable.

I walked alone and blinking through the bright, cool afternoon to see them. My own exams, it turned out, had not gone as badly as I’d feared. Deb’s name wasn’t there, of course, as she hadn’t taken the exams. But my name was among the Firsts. In fact, it was a high First, which meant I would be a Senior Scholar of the College next year. Of course I couldn’t know, back then, what it really meant. That I had momentum, that inertia would be enough from now on. That I was set on my path, flung into orbit around this strange institution. My marriage bed was made that day and I had no idea.

I did not go back to my aunt and uncle’s house for the summer vacation. It would have benefited no one. So I ended up sharing spaces around College with the few graduate students who also didn’t leave for summers. Gin was there in the working library most days, and she would still turn to me from time to time with questions about an argument she was working on. But she never pried, never wanted to know what I was writing in the notebooks I drew out every day from my bag. I had asked her, just to make sure, whether she knew Deb. She didn’t.

I was still making do with an old khaki backpack—you know, the kind from the Army and Navy Stores, made of canvas webbing—that I’d been given as a birthday gift years ago. It had seen me through most of secondary school, and it was a stalwart ally. Although it was frayed and dirty now, that was all part of the look. Still, it sat awkwardly sometimes next to Gin’s beautifully aged soft leather satchel. You could buy a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook for 10p from the post office next to Heffers, and my bag usually contained the two or three of these that I was currently