The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  “What’s that?” Jim asked. “Who’s it going to be?”

  “Oh, just some dude,” Franklin said. “Now it’s your turn.” He stood over Jim’s shoulder while Jim finished the cat, and he really was a good teacher, asking Jim all the right questions to help him remember how the cat looked, and to put names to the feelings the cat evoked. Jim managed to draw something much prettier and lifelike (and therefore more representative and cleansing, Franklin said) than the stick figure he would have done on his own. There you are, Jim said to it. You were a good cat. We had some good times together, I’m sure. But now I’m going someplace where pets are not allowed.

  “Now hold the name in your mind,” Franklin said, “and tear that fucker to shreds.” Jim did as he was told. He sang the name in his head—Feathers!—and tore the picture to shreds. “There you go,” Franklin said. “Now isn’t that better?”

  “Maybe,” Jim said. “But I still remember the cat—even better than before, actually. Now I can see it.”

  “Well, sure,” Franklin replied, a little crossly. “You still need to find your own way. That’s why I’m not a horse trainer. Only you can truly free yourself from the bondage of the past.”

  “Yeah, that Frank is intense!” Sondra said. Jim went to see her when he was done with Franklin. Her studio was actually the whole garden. She gave him a hand-weeder. “But it’s hard, obviously. Figuring out your new job. I’m a lot more mellow than Frank, you can probably tell.”

  A lot more sad, anyway, Jim wanted to say. That was the sort of bold conversational risk he used to take routinely as a chaplain, but it didn’t seem appropriate here—he was supposed to be learning from these people, not trying to counsel them. Still, in a professional way, his heart went out to her. “Too bad they don’t need any humanist atheist chaplains in the future,” he said. “I know how to do that.” She took him to a row of carrots, where they knelt together and began to weed.

  “Or hairdressers,” she said.

  “Oh, is that what you did?”

  “We owned a few salons,” she said. “Well, scads and scads of salons, actually. You don’t buy a ticket to the future with tips!”

  “I suppose we shouldn’t be talking about this,” Jim said. “Our old jobs in our old lives. You should tell me about the work you’re doing right here and now.”

  “Sure,” Sondra said. “But fuck it. Why don’t you meet me later in my room? I’ll make you look like Sandy Duncan and you can pray for my soul.”

  “I don’t believe in souls,” Jim said.

  “Ha! Then you can pray for my connectome.”

  “You can style my connectome,” said Jim. Sondra slapped her thigh with her little shovel and laughed. When he’d gotten every weed within reach, he started to make the soil neat and flat around the tender little carrot tops. “So tell me about your method.”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s simple, really. Which is what makes it so beautiful. I treat each plant like a memory. Or I treat each memory like a plant. Anyhow, I bury them in the earth. End of story.”

  “I see,” Jim said. “And what about the feelings that go with the memories?” They moved down the garden row and knelt again.

  “Bury them, too,” she said. “They’re, like, the fertilizer.”

  “I see. But what happens when the plants come up? What’s the part that breaks the memory? What’s the part that makes it go away?”

  “Fuck if I know!” Sondra said. She sat back on her heels, took off her hat, and hit him with it. “Haha!” she said, smiling, but he thought she looked panicked around her eyes. “I’m just gardening because I like it, actually. There’s no fancy plan.”

  “Oh,” Jim said. “That’s . . . allowed?”

  “I suppose it must be. Nobody’s given me any shit yet. I’ll come up with something. What’s the hurry?” She moved closer to him until their hips were touching. Then they weeded awhile in silence, until she said she had psyched herself up enough to plant some parsnips. She insisted on spitting the seeds into the little holes, so Jim did that too, and he stayed with her until the air started to cool and the sun was going down. He liked the dirt on his hands, and the pressure of Sondra’s shoulder and hip against his own, and he liked not thinking, for a little while, about who or what or whether he was going to forget. Which was probably why she asked, after another long spell of quiet, “Are you like me?”

  “Maybe,” Jim said. “Probably. Do you mean tired?”

  “Square peg,” she said. “You know, No-Fitty.”

  Jim squinted at her.

  “I mean,” she said, “do you think it could possibly be worth it?”

  “What?” Jim asked, though he knew just what she was talking about.

  “Forgetting them,” she said softly.

  He took her dirty hand with his own, thinking of all the wrong things he could say to her. Don’t you think your husband would want you to live? Wouldn’t he want you to get on with your life? Those were the things you could never say to someone who is grieving. You could only notice for them when they finally start saying such things to themselves. “I think we have to make it worth it,” he said to her. She took her hand away.

  “Yeah. Well, I asked Alice for my money back, you know. Me and Joe, we were supposed to come together. And Polaris—Old Polaris, 1982 Polaris—they said that we could. He said he’d be right behind me, the last time we said goodbye, though he was healthy as a horse. That didn’t matter, anyway. If he outlived me by thirty years, he’d still be here now. But you know what Alice told me when I asked where he was?”

  “I know,” Jim said. “You still have to forget. It’s hard. It’s so hard. But maybe you’ll meet again on the other side. Even not remembering.”

  “What’s the use of being together,” she asked, “if you can’t enjoy it?” She snorted. “Anyway. I just want my money back. But you know what Alice said to that? ‘Money hasn’t existed for quite a while now.’ ”

  Jim stayed with Sondra a little longer, not saying anything else, just trying to comfort her with his presence. But the truth was she was making him very sad, and also making him want to get to his own work before he felt too sad to start it. He told her it was becoming too dark for him to see what he was doing. “That’s okay,” she said. “I can do this with my eyes closed. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  Jim went up to his room. He lay down on his bed, closing his eyes to concentrate fully on conceiving of his method. Sondra had helped him in one way at least: exposure to her sad nostalgia had fertilized wistful memories of his own, and now he could feel them starting to grow, pressing against his awareness, demanding to be examined. It would have been so much nicer to just go to sleep, but instead of doing that he kept very still in his mind. Then when he felt a little prepared for it, he began to survey them, rejecting almost every memory as too precious and therefore too hard to start with.

  Stories, he decided. That’s what he would do. He’d put the memories into stories, and when he recognized the person, place, or thing of the memory, when he felt it, he would end the story and the memory at once. Jane’s mother presented herself right away as his first subject, and though he very swiftly arranged a fatal car accident for her in his imagination, he was unable to let her get in the vehicle. Jane he rejected out of hand—surely she would come last in this process. He also pushed aside a whole host of unpleasant memories: his mother’s horrible death, his own accident, the babies he and Jane had tried to have and the one that they very nearly did have. Even though he’d already learned a style of happiness, in his old life that involved keeping things like this always half-forgotten. Starting with the babies felt like the wrong kind of practice. So he came back eventually to the cat.

  It was just a cat, after all. And he was only lying in bed, after all. He would tell himself a story in which the cat—the whole cat, the idea and the substance of it, what the cat had been for him and who he had tried to be for the cat—was perfectly represented, or as close as he could manage, and then
perfectly eliminated. Once upon a time, he told himself, there was a cat named Feathers. “What a strange name for a cat!” people said, whenever she introduced herself, which hurt Feathers’s feelings very much.

  When he was done, when the cat was strangled, when he could feel the horrible dead weight of it in the exquisitely sensitive hands of his story, he cried himself to sleep, acutely aware that this was a worse pain than anything he had known yet here in the future. But when the bell rang for dinner, he woke refreshed, and he felt a little better, not about the cat (what cat?), but about everything else.

  “I had a bad feeling about that man,” her mother said, by way of comfort for the dead lawsuit. Jane had gone right upstairs and gotten into bed with her clothes on when she came home from Flanagan’s office. Her mother was standing in her bedroom door.

  “Who are these people?” Jane asked. “That they could do something like this?”

  “You’re making some very broad assumptions,” her mother said.

  “Well, he didn’t just go on vacation, did he?”

  Her mother shrugged. “Maybe he’s fleeing his creditors, or the ABA. He’s probably in Tahiti with Wanda, if that was even really her name, counting your money on the beach.”

  “Mother, he never even charged me anything.”

  “New Jersey has been full of derelicts and thieves for decades,” her mother continued. But then she sighed hugely. “Darling, what can I do for you?” Jane asked her to bring the computer and a glass of wine.

  Jane went back to the Penelope Project. Listen to me! she shouted. They killed my lawyer! But the conversation scrolled on serenely, so she wrote, Stop talking about tea! We are all in terrible danger!

  In danger of becoming seriously annoyed, wrote Iphigenia7. And Jane got two frowns from Helen22.

  What’s wrong with you? Jane wrote. I don’t understand! She got another frown. I don’t understand you stupid people! Then the frowns came in a staccato burst, and Jane found herself recoiling from her computer screen, overwhelmed with the notion of three dozen faces (even the lurking ladies were coming out of hiding to frown at her) crowding one another out of the way to show her their expressions of displeasure. And then she actually started to cry, wishing she could tell Jim that the computer had hurt her feelings, or even just tell her mother that all the other hens were pecking at her like a diseased chicken. After a few minutes the laptop began to chime softly at her, as if in apology. When she raised her head up from her arms she saw that she had ended up one frown short of a lifetime ban, and that someone called Hecuba66 had invited her to a private room to talk. She accepted the invitation and typed, with one finger, Hello? Hecuba wrote back immediately.

  Sorry about them. They’re cowards.

  Really?

  Of course. I was listening to everything you said, she wrote. You’re right,Polaris is a fucking monster. Are they appalling you? Are they torturing you? Did they send you the dvd?

  They took off my husband’s head with a chisel.

  I know! Of course they did.

  And now I’m so angry about it I don’t know what to do.

  Of course you are! So am I, seven years later.

  I guess the grief work didn’t help.

  The only kind of grief work I want to do is the one where somebody stands on Brian Wilson’s head while I kick him in the face.

  Brian! Did he call you too?

  He still calls me every year—every year on the anniversary. I’m so sorry, Jane wrote. That sounds like torture.

  It is torture. But don’t be sorry. Sorry’s not going to get any husbands back. Just be angry.

  How long did you fight them?

  Over Albert? Years and years. I’m still fighting. Even when it all comes to nothing. The lawyer quits, or disappears, or gets disappeared. The letters to the da’s office are never acknowledged, the phone calls never returned. Your Huffington Post article is subject to mysterious edits and redactions, and when you complain they all say the changes were your idea, and they show you the email you never sent asking for the changes. None of that works—the only hope now is direct attack. But I can’t get inside. None of us can. We’ve tried.

  Inside? Others?

  The rest of us. We’re not all inclined to just sit here and take it. So we’ve tried to get inside. Inside the pyramid. You know, to disable the dewars. Pull the plug. We’ve tried dressing as cleaning women, climbing in through vents, hijacking a drone, but none of it works. Polaris knows our names, our faces, our fingerprints. We’ve blown our own covers. The only people who get in the building are the employees and the members. The shepherds and the sheep.

  The members go in? When they’re still alive?

  Yes, those poor dumb beasts. The orientation ceremony is directly above the freezers. Can you imagine anything more disgusting?

  Jane remembered a family-systems workshop Jim had attended two years before, in Orlando. It made her head hurt just to think about it. They invited me to be a member, she wrote. Sort of.

  There was a long pause. Jane stared at the cursor.

  They invited you?

  Brian did. Basically.

  There was another pause.

  We have resources. We have details. We have a plan. All that’s left is a question.

  What do you mean?

  The question is: Are you angry enough to make this work?

  Tell me what you mean? Make what work?

  Are you angry enough? Do you really hate them? If you want to really get them, then we can help you do it. We can do it together. But you have to be angry enough at what they did to your husband. At what they did to your marriage. At what they did to all of us. Are you angry enough? Are you raging? Are you furious?

  Jane tried out one answer: No, not really. I mean, probably almost, but when I think about it very calmly I understand that I’ll move on from this one day. Nobody can live a whole life obsessed with one stupid decision her husband made. Nobody can live their whole life in nightmare daydreams of chisels and frozen heads and . . . She stopped because the chatroom told her she had run out of characters, but she already knew she wasn’t going to send that.

  And I can get Jim’s head back? Jane wrote, when she cleared the text box.

  No, wrote Hecuba. But you can keep them from having it either.

  Okay, Jane wrote, so acutely aware that she might just close her computer, and change her phone number, and try to forget the Penelopes, and Brian, and Polaris. Or just stop thinking about them. Okay, she wrote again, and she was writing it for the same reason she would have said it, if she and Hecuba66 had been having a face-to-face conversation sitting cross-legged on her bed, whispering together under a blanket—so she could have just one more moment to think, and then one more moment. Except that what she decided was that there wasn’t anything to decide. She wasn’t deciding to do this any more than you decided to bleed when someone stabbed you in the heart. Okay, she wrote. Okay. Tell me how this is going to work.

  Jim had gotten into the habit of waking up early to work on his book of stories—there would be one for every memory he needed to capture and destroy. Some were very short, only a sentence or two. Others were a couple of paragraphs, and a few were ten pages long. But none of them tried to do anything but represent his feelings for a person, place, or thing that had been part of his own life. When a story was done, he flipped the page and started a new one, and he never looked back. He’d been at work on it for almost three weeks, and had no idea what he’d written, since as soon as he finished a story and turned the page, the thing it was about vanished from his mind and his memory. But though he felt lighter somehow when he looked at the fat wad of pages he’d covered already, he also knew how much work he had yet to do. He hoped it would all fit in one book, since he meant to burn it when he got to the city for his Debut.

  At 3:30 in the morning, the house was always dark and still. Jim would creep down to the kitchen for coffee, and then go to his office, a tiny room on the third floor that faced the
front of the house. That morning he had just put his head down at his desk to consider a next line, and fallen asleep, then woke at the noise of the front door shutting. Rushing to the window, he saw Franklin depart the house.

  Something in the way that his friend held himself as he walked to the bus kept Jim from shouting out congratulations. Franklin, totally naked, walked very carefully across the lawn—it was a surprise for Jim to see him naked, but it made sense that Franklin would cast off all unnecessary accoutrements before he left the house and even that he would go naked into the future. That was all of a piece with Franklin’s artistic and dramatic style of mental evolution. Shouting during Franklin’s ceremonial walk would have been like clapping at a funeral, so Jim ran back to his desk and made a sign in big block letters: Good Luck, Friend! But Franklin didn’t look back once on his way to the bus—it had fat puffy tires and though it rolled all over the lawn, the grass looked untouched where it passed—and once he was inside, the windows were too dark to tell if he was looking back. But Jim tilted the sign from side to side, and opened his mouth as big as a singing Muppet to make soft congratulatory crowd noises, and he kept waving until the bus passed over the roadless hills.

  “Something wonderful has happened!” he said to Sondra at breakfast, and showed her the sign he had made. He was intoxicated with happiness for Franklin, though still he ought to have anticipated that Sondra might be sad about it, and so he should have broken the news to her more gently. As soon as she understood, she started to cry.

  “I’m just so happy for him,” Sondra said, but Jim could tell that was for the benefit of all the other faces around the table. You weren’t supposed to cry when somebody moved out of the house, you were supposed to applaud or cheer or propose some variety of toast. So Sondra pushed her tears away with the heels of her hands, and rang her glass with a spoon with all the others in salute to Franklin’s achievement.