by Chris Adrian
“Happy birthday!” the Alices said, and the others all said it too. Sondra shouted and sobbed in his ear until Franklin drew her away. Alice pulled Jim up to the cake. “Don’t forget to make a wish,” she said. The others began to murmur and then sing again, “Welcome, welcome,” and even in the humid air, warmed by their collective breath, he could feel the heat of the cake’s single candle as a discrete warmth on his face. Jim closed his eyes and made his wish, which was a question directed not at God, who had never really existed for him, but at everyone he had ever loved when he was alive: at his childhood friends and the teachers who had changed his life; his parents and his aunts and uncles; his adult friends and colleagues; the patients he had loved as a doctor and the patients he had loved as a chaplain; and the friends he had never physically met but with whom he felt close in spirit, Bugs Bunny and Batman and Valentine Michael Smith and Billy Pilgrim and Harry Potter, Pope John XXIII and Maya Angelou and Michelle Obama. And then there was Jane, who was, after all, the only person he really needed to ask: Please, can I stay here and live?
After they’d eaten the cake, everyone moved outside to continue the party on the patio. Jim didn’t join in when others removed their clothes and slipped into the hot tub. He didn’t protest when Sondra sat on the edge of his chaise, or when she took his foot in her lap and began to massage his heel. “I like a nice handsome foot,” she said.
“My toes are very sensitive,” Jim said.
“And I like a nice hairy foot. Joe had feet like a hobbit.”
“Who’s Joe?”
“Nobody,” she said, squeezing too hard. Jim winced.
“Gently,” said Jim’s Alice, coming up behind the head of Jim’s chair and laying a hand upon his shoulder. “Those toes are brand-new sensory organs.”
“Sorry,” Sondra said, throwing his foot down. She walked away, shedding her clothes on the way to the hot tub, stepping in just as Ahh! was standing up in the water to show everyone her ambiguous genitalia, wet enough now to start swelling up like one of those compacted foam dinosaurs you might put into a child’s bath. Jim turned his gaze away to Alice, who was staring at him, as friendly and serene as a sloth. “I think it’s past my bedtime,” he said to her, and she took him up to his room and tucked him in.
“Welcome, welcome,” she said again, kissing Jim’s forehead. She paused at the door, which made him feel like a child.
“Such a long day,” he said to her before she turned out the light and closed the door, though what he really wanted was to ask if they might not say a prayer together before he went to sleep, a prayer for the dead. Then it felt to him as if he spent the next few hours totally still in his body but restless in his spirit and his mind, trying to find the words for that prayer. How stupid, he thought, that no one ever pitied the dead for their grief, the religionists too busy making the hugely broad assumption that the dead were too distracted by bliss to miss the living, and the atheists thinking oblivion would be enough to comfort anybody who sustained that kind of loss. Now I am too sad to sleep, he told himself, wishing that he hadn’t retired from the fellowship of the party and the comfort of the wine, and he wished Alice had stayed with him, sitting by his bed and singing him to sleep. But then, as if it had sensed his mood and jumped into the bed to comfort him, the name was suddenly there with him. Feathers, he said to himself, just before he fell asleep. What a weird name for a cat.
Mr. Flanagan had a plan, which he and his wife described to Jane in a series of shouting emails over the next two weeks, each message filled with citations of supportive cases, and links to obscure Internet chambers where people murmured against Polaris and cryonics and longevitists and immortalists and futurists and even the very idea of the future itself. Wanda sent Jane frequent (sometimes hourly) supplemental updates on the research. It was Wanda who found the online support group for cryonics widows called the Penelope Project and strongly encouraged Jane to join. Look, she wrote, a group for people just like you.
Jane had a look, but didn’t stay long. It seemed merely to be a forum for women to congratulate one another on being lonely and depressed. She lurked invisibly for a while in the chat room, waiting for someone to be angry about what had happened to them all, but the five visible members were having only a very measured and passionless conversation about their grief work. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Jane announced herself with a post: Polaris is a monster. When the others ignored her, she tried again a few minutes later: Polaris is a fucking monster!
Clytemnestra111 responded: Hey language Polyxena3! This is a sacred space!
Jane wrote: Sorry but they are monsters you know. Don’t you think they are monsters?
Clytemnestra replied, Bottled-up sadness is the only monster, and then the rest of them followed:
Helen22 said: You never mind them honey.
Iphigenia7 said: There’s nothing you can do about them.
Andromache57 said: They’re just a red herring in your grief work.
Cassandra99 said: Andromache you mean a McGuffin.
Andromache57 said: I mean a red herring.
Clytemnestra111 said: They’re a distraction. We all fled into anger at one time or another, but that just keeps you from feeling how you feel.
Jane wrote: I know how I feel.
And Clytemnestra wrote: But do you feel how you feel?
I hate them, Jane wrote.
Helen wrote: Honey, it sounds like you’re ready for some Grief Work 101.
I don’t need Grief Work 101, Jane wrote. I need my husband’s head returned to me.
Grief Work is Good Work, Helen wrote. It’s not them you hate. It’s yourself. It’s your own grief you hate.
I hate them!!! Jane wrote, practically typing with her fists. And I hate you too. There were a few beats of silence in the room. Jane’s cursor was throbbing.
They always lash out in the beginning, Clytemnestra wrote.
Amen, wrote Helen.
Just give her some time, wrote Cassandra. I was like that at first. Wasn’t I like that?
You were totally like that, wrote Andromache, and Jane wrote, I’m still here. But they wouldn’t talk to her anymore, only about her, and before long the conversation had settled back into its original course, which was concerned only with holding fragile memories and cherishing lost moments and traveling metaphorically back in time to put all those shared moments that were your life together to rest like babies. You mean put them down like sick cats? Jane wrote, and then Or smother them like babies? and finally Or set them adrift like elderly Eskimos? Then she got locked out of the chat room because too many of the members had sent her a frown.
Mr. Flanagan wrote several times a day about his evolving legal plan, which Jane ever only partially understood. He told her that she didn’t have to concern herself with the three organizations who might be willing to file briefs of amicus curiae, or whether he could apply her suit as a mass action even if no one else joined her in her complaints, or whether Polaris, in as little as six months, could be served with a double-inverse injunction preventing them from freezing new heads, at which point he would have them just where he wanted them, and then he and Jane, and every other wife or husband or mother or father or sister or brother or lover or very close friend who had lost some beloved body to their gruesome experimentations, could start to really make them pay.
All Jane had to do, he told her, was stay connected to her anger and grief, which meant remaining acutely aware of how Polaris was ruining her life, and interfering with the natural course of her grieving, and causing her mental suffering. In doing that, she would generate the soul of their case, and so her mantra, until their day came in court, must now be document, document, document. Wanda gave her a journal—not a book but a secure Web address with a word-processing app featuring a triply redundant save feature that printed Jane’s entries automatically every morning in Flanagan’s office. Wanda locked the pages in a fireproof safe, and though she said she wouldn’t read them, she did. “ ‘Alw
ays together,’ ” Wanda quoted breathlessly, the first time she called to tell Jane she wasn’t meeting her quota of journal entries. “ ‘Never apart.’ That’s lovely. That’s mental anguish! We are going to destroy the jury with this.”
“It’s just our vows,” Jane said. “What we promised. The promise he broke.”
“You mean what they took away,” Wanda said. “What they did. I’m not saying they murdered your marriage but it’s almost that bad. It’s negligent marriage homicide. It’s heartslaughter. So this is great, honey. You’re doing great. We just need more, more more!”
Her husband added that they needed mountains of hard subjective data that would overwhelm the judge and jury, leaving them no choice but to find in Jane’s favor. To that end he gave Jane a button she was supposed to push at any time of the day or night when she felt mental hardship on account of Polaris taking Jim’s head away and freezing it and refusing to give it back to her. The button talked to a base station in the foyer, which talked through the phone lines to a computer in Flanagan’s office, which kept an endless virtual ticker tape of data points like a heart monitor. At first Jane just held it down rigidly for hours at a time, which prompted a call from Wanda to say she was confusing the computer. She praised Jane for recording her constant mental anguish, and recommended that Jane instead just push the button as fast as she could. Jane called back when both her thumbs were exhausted and sore. Flanagan got on the phone to say a repetitive motion injury would only help their case.
Almost three weeks after their first meeting, just as Jane was thinking seriously about going back to work, and trying to figure out where to keep a mental-anguish receiver at the hospital so it would be in range of the button, Flanagan asked to meet again. “I’m onto something,” he told her, “but I think we should talk about it face to face.” She could feel him winking through the phone. “It’s big. It’s enough to make you push the other button. The good button, if you know what I mean.”
“The happy button?”
“The ‘we’re going to win’ button,” he said. “Sleep well tonight. And don’t talk to whatshisface!” He ended all their conversations that way, though Jane didn’t need to be reminded not to call Brian after Flanagan had told her even one more word to him might compromise their case. Brian—or some Polaris autobot—texted every morning, but she never replied, and she never answered her phone, or listened to the messages, when Brian called every evening just after dinnertime.
Wanda’s diary website was down when Jane went to make an entry before bed, and it was still down when she woke up. The mental-anguish receiver was beeping sharply, at three-minute intervals, like a smoke detector asking for new batteries, but it was plugged firmly into the wall. Even the button itself somehow felt less springy.
When Jane arrived at the strip mall, Flanagan’s office was empty, not just of people but of every bit of furniture. She walked outside and stood by the door, making sure of where she was—same dollar store, same threading salon, but now the office was just a blank window. She went inside the salon and asked what happened to Mr. Flanagan. The proprietress raised a hand to her face and blew quickly and harshly across her open palm. “He blew away?” Jane asked, but the lady just shrugged. Jane went back to the office and stood in the empty waiting room, calling every number she had for Mr. Flanagan. None of them were in service. Then she called Brian, who had sent her his customary text that morning: We are all always thinking of you here at Polaris.
“What did you do?” she asked as soon as he picked up. “What did you do?”
“Dr. Cotton,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“You bastard,” she said. “What did you people do to my lawyer?”
“We didn’t do anything. Dr. Cotton, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did something happen to Mr. Flanagan?”
She held a pose for moment, one she struck a few times a year at the hospital, holding the phone against her chest with one hand while the other pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to contain herself, but nonetheless she shrieked her reply. “If you didn’t do anything, then how do you know his name?” Then she threw her phone across the office, and when it wasn’t broken yet, when Brian’s teddy bear voice was still mumbling sympathetically into the appalling emptiness of the rooms, she threw it again, and then one more time, until it shattered.
The morning after his birthday party, Jim showed up early at Alice’s door, ready to learn how to evoke, contain, and forget the memories that were keeping him from starting his new life in the future. He planned on starting small—maybe with Feathers the cat.
“You must free yourself in your own way,” Alice said gently, when Jim made it clear to her that he thought they were supposed to have a lesson that morning. “They are your memories. It was your life. It will be your new life that begins when you are ready. So it must be your work—your art—that holds and abolishes the memories in your way.”
“But I don’t understand,” Jim said.
“Yes, you do,” she said, and closed her door—gently but firmly—in his face. When he knocked again she didn’t open it, but called out that he might go see how the other clients did their work, instead of asking her questions she couldn’t answer for him.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Jim asked, and Alice answered through the door that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He found each of his housemates hard at work in one way or another, and all of them were polite if not quite helpful to him. It wasn’t long before he started to feel like he had going up and down in the hospital when he visited patients as a chaplain, a not-quite-welcome visitor who asked quiet questions about people’s processes. There’s one, he thought to himself, considering the memory, the hospital smell and the noise of his shoes on the linoleum, and the way the sanitizing hand gel felt when he squirted his hands before he knocked on a door. But he didn’t do anything with that memory but put it aside, which was not at all the same as forgetting it.
He went to see Brenda in her pottery studio (where, she told him, she was throwing vessels that would not just contain but be the memories of her old life—she fired and glazed the vessels with great care, only to smash them against the wall as soon as they had cooled) and Blanket in her salon de danse, where she said she was choreographing her lived experience of the old world (her memories were contained in still poses and then destroyed in violent leaps and rolls and kicks). Jim visited Eagle among a mess of little wooden Jenga pieces, which she painstakingly assembled into tall arches held together by gravity alone and meant to perfectly represent one episode from her old life; when the arch collapsed, the memory troubled her no more. Folly appeared to be training plump black ants to battle one another to the death inside a neatly raked Zen sandpit (she wouldn’t speak to Jim, but by her gestures she made it clear enough that they somehow were managing to cancel her memories out), and Ahh!, with whom he spent barely any time, appeared to be very intently masturbating, her led hair changing color in a panting cadence in her shadowed room. She took absolutely no notice of him, but he imagined she might be pursuing a perfectly representative and destructive orgasm.
“I like that one,” Jim said to Franklin, the next to last person he visited. “Because it seems respectful to them, you know. To the people and the memories. Like, that extraordinary attention is a way of acknowledging how much they’re worth to you. I can’t believe I’m saying this.”
“But I know just what you mean. And I understand. You have to be good to them, somehow. You have to be trying really hard to represent them. Because they’re worth it, of course. But also, if you didn’t try hard enough, there might be something . . . left over. Which can be very bad for you.”
“An explosion, right? Alice said something about that.” Franklin nodded without looking up from his drawing. He had Jim working on a drawing of his own. “You’re the best at teaching this, you know. By far.”
“Only because I had a hard time with it too, in the beginning. Who wouldn’t?” He had given Jim a l
arge pad of newsprint and a piece of charcoal, then showed him how to draw a circle from the shoulder, and said he should draw a thousand of them before lunch. “I came to drawing by watching another client breaking horses,” Franklin said. “Noticing how those muscles contain the uncontainable. And what I saw her doing with them was just . . . a recognition, you know? She was going after a feeling—what a wild life she must have had, to need those beasts to represent it! She was putting her feelings about her old life into those horses, and breaking her feelings. You break enough feelings and you’re new again. Right?”
“But then you have to live without feelings?”
“Don’t be silly,” Franklin said. “Then you’ve got room for new feelings. About new things. In a new life. Then you’re ready for your Debut.” He stepped back from his drawing, a young girl with dark eyes and long hair parted in the middle. “Anyway. You picked a good time to visit my studio. This one’s almost done.”
“She’s lovely,” Jim said. “Very lifelike. Did you draw in your other life?”
Franklin shrugged. “I don’t remember,” he said, winking. “Not anymore.” He took the drawing up in his hands. “It’s my cousin Sylvia. I mean it’s her, and it’s how I feel about her. She wasn’t actually so special. Some people save the hardest goodbyes for last, but I’m just dealing with outliers at this point. Ready?”
“Sure,” Jim said. He put down his charcoal.
“So, like I said: Step one, illustration and integration.” He waved the picture. “Step two, consideration, recognition.” He gave it a long hard look. Then he shouted, “Step three!” and tore the lovely picture in half again and again. When the pieces were too small to rip all together he worried them individually with his teeth, and growled over them. By the time he was done, the pieces were everywhere on the floor and Jim was backed up against a wall. “You know,” Franklin said, when he’d caught his breath, “I think I’m about ready for my masterpiece.” He was smiling and his lips were as black as a dog’s.
