Cynthia Nitz Ris
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Hundreds of Years From Now in America You’re Talking to Your Father
in a sense, and he wonders what became of life as he knew it,
where you are now just a computer chip he places in a slot
in his head, or rather has placed in his head by impulses he sends
via his thought waves since he is but a previously cryopreserved-
head, frozen since before it was fashionable to do so. He has
a recollection through your memory, which is now also his,
of an animated TV program where heads such as Nixon’s—
whose presidency he knew, but you knew only through such shows—
were kept in jars, attached, not unlike his own, to electronic life‐lines.
Life imitating art, he thinks, but no memory‐line extracts the author,
and he wonders if he can upgrade to a model with more memory. As he
accesses your chip’s file, he now remembers how you followed his wishes
after his deanimation, sending him to rest on dry ice during the quibbles
with the lawyers and ex‐wives, how you watched, dully and alone,
as the director prepared your father’s head for liquid‐nitrogen preservation.
Months and years thinking about that head, you still sent installments
from the insurance money, not touching them for repairs on your house,
for your daughter’s braces, or, when it became necessary, for the divorce lawyer,
but to keep one particular cryostat active for that someday that is happening now.
By the time you died, you’d signed your father up for “friends and family
connection” bonus, where you and those of your fathers’ friends you coerced
into signing, pledged to submit to post‐death external hard‐drive transfers.
Your life on your chip, a dozen of your father’s friends on theirs, have now
been installed as his memory system. Never, in all the centuries it will take
for his reanimated head to die again, will he want for a thought or a recollection.
All lives are his: reincarnation at its best—no discovering oneself alive
in a bug or a beast; instead, safe in the shell of his very own head, he has worlds
at the thoughts of his fingertips. He can now remember the sex his best friend
had with your mother; remembers how she fell, dead drunk, into the path of the truck.
He remembers your search for half‐brothers, their mother working three jobs. At first
he doesn’t understand, but then knows how years after his death, how his passion
to live on and on could eat away at those left behind, and he remembers now that
before you ended your life, you provided for this one last gift that repaid in some small way
the legacy he’d left for you. This too your father can know, for as long as his head shall live.
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Cynthia Nitz Ris is a Chicago native and former lawyer. She teaches English Composition, including the Rhetoric of Law, at the University of Cincinnati. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Conte Online, The Shangri-la Shack Literary Arts Journal, Innisfree, and Snakeskin, as well as the anthologies Remembrances of Wars Past and Poem, Home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica.