For many years after, I would believe I'd periodically woken, though the researchers assured me this was not the case. That the memories I retained—a shaggy dog laden with a tea tray, a voice crying out for more milk—were just figments of dream. I had been asleep the whole time.

As soon as the grogginess cleared, I asked for you by name.

"One thing at a time," said the woman aiming a flashlight into my eyes. Her breath smelled citrusy. The thought struck me that I hadn't tasted a piece of fruit in over a year. "Can you get up for me? Slowly, now. That's a good girl."

The woman had me stand on my tiptoes, pace back and forth, and touch my fingertip to my nose. She recorded my height and weight on her clipboard. She asked me:

Did I remember my name?

Did I know what year it was?

Did I know where I was?

"Don't you think," I said, "I would be asking a lot more questions if I didn't know where I was?"

You were somewhere in this building. Maybe right on the other side of this wall. We had gone under together on January 11, 2015. We had slept through the beginnings of the refugee crisis. The nuclear deal with Iran. Another researcher would explain this to me later, offering a 2015 calendar with significant events marked in bold.

After changing into a fresh pair of clothes, I was led into a room I recognized as the clinic's cafeteria. The room was crowded with other study participants and the family that had arrived to greet them. I had no family. All I had was you. At sixteen we had run away from our parents' neighboring apple farms after your brother found us kissing in a nest of rotten Honeycrisps. The cops dragged us back. A year later, we repeated our stunt. This time no one came looking.

You were the one who found the study. Something to do with coma patient care. Participants could earn up to six grand. We were broke, sharing a studio above a beauty salon. The acetone fumes made us giddy. What was one year of our lives, sacrificed in the name of science? Sliding the warmth of our legs together beneath the cool sheets, we speculated on how the world might be a better place when we awoke. Marriage equality. Hover cars. Clean energy.

When I couldn't locate you in the cafeteria, I hailed a woman in a lab coat, who took me to an office where she consulted a computer and informed me the name Lily Wilson did not appear on the study's list.

"That's impossible." Panic sat strangely in my belly after all those months of quiet repose. "She went through the preliminary testing with me. We came on the same day."

The woman frowned and began typing again. "Did you say you were family?"

"What does that matter?"

"The confidentiality agreement—"

"Please," I said. "Just tell me what happened."

There must have been something in my voice. A crack of desperation. A lilt that reminded her of her own daughter. She had no obligation to tell me. She could have maintained her silence, called security to haul me away shrieking, and I would be here, Lily, eight years later, wondering still what they had done to you. How they had managed to separate us, whose union had seemed unquestionable since the time we were tiny children.

The researchers had turned you down. They had done it to hundreds of other eager participants. We'd seen them stumping out of the clinic's lobby and had fluttered our fingers in farewell. You told me nothing of this. When you signed on for a new study—run by the same research center but riskier, more lucrative—you told me nothing of this, either. On January 10, 2015, you hugged me goodbye. I was already wearing the mint green polyester pajamas. Then you went to the research compound next door for your own prep. The study was on cryonics. Extended live-body preservation. Most participants had signed on for one to two years. You had put yourself down for ten.

Lily, I am twenty-seven now. Studies like ours have become popular. Advertisements plaster the subways in colorful squares. Broke high schoolers go under to pay for college. Gamblers sleep away their debts. Protesters gather outside every clinic, railing against the exploitation of the poor. On TV, politicians gather to debate the ethics. My wife is one of these. I like to mute the news show and imagine her moving lips relay a silent message just for me. Her influence bought me what I have striven for these past eight years: an appointment with your body, sealed in winter behind glass. Your face is the face of a nineteen-year-old. The hair has been shaved from your scalp. The researchers have rigged the tank that contains you with a set of speakers, through which they periodically blast opera music. Part of the study, I'm told. To see what the wakened brain might recall.

If I scrutinize your face for days, maybe I'll know why you did it. A memory will surface: I'll recall some comment you made over dinner about your exhaustion, your fear that the world was tipping into hate, your desire to put the years away like a cursed heirloom on a high shelf. But I don't have days. I have minutes, and your cold features are giving nothing away.

So I decide to speak. If you're dreaming, and if my voice has any influence over those dreams, I want them to be sweet. I tell you that nuclear weapons have been eliminated. That every refugee has found a home. That we have hover cars that run on clean energy. You should see them after sundown: how they sector the night into bands of dazzling brightness and the darkness that falls between.

Tessa Yang's stories have appeared in Joyland, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly and others. She teaches creative writing at Earlham College.

"Preservation" is a Finalist for the 2019 Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Jacob Surland.

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