by Chris Adrian
After breakfast, when she and Jim had gone into the garden to work on their respective projects, Jim sat down next to her where she was kneeling and said, “I’d have to be a very sorry sort of chaplain to believe those were happy tears.”
“But you’re not a chaplain anymore,” Sondra said, not looking up from her rhubarb. “Now you’re a novelist. Like Jackie Collins.”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Sure you are,” said Sondra, as she stabbed at the rhubarb with her shovel.
Jim moved away a little, and turned his attention again to his book, trying to think about what to write next. A half hour or so passed before he said, “How are you doing over there?” He had been looking over at her intermittently and noticed that she had been still for a while.
She stood up and stretched. “You know, I think it’s time for a nap. How long have we been out here? Six hours?”
“More like one, I think,” Jim said.
“Ugh. I’m going to go lie down. What are you going to do?” She winked at him.
“I suppose I’ll probably lie down, too,” he said.
“Well, all righty,” Sondra said. “Then I guess I’ll see you later.”
Jim put his finger on his nose and smiled. He liked her winking, though he had agreed with Franklin that she did it too much—one couldn’t be merrily conspiratorial all the time. But they all had tics and gestures that were the habits of their respective times. Jim was still holding his fist out for bumps that would never come. Brenda stuck out her tongue and goggled her eyes in a Maori fright mask to signal her delight with something. Sondra winked because that was what funny ladies did back when she was learning to be a funny lady. He wondered if she would still wink, after she had her Debut, retaining the habit even after she abandoned her memories of Barbara Streisand and Goldie Hawn. He sighed and got back to his work, struggling for another half hour before he decided he ought to take a break and go minister to Sondra. He had written five new pages and felt a little lighter.
Folly saw him in the upstairs hall and smiled knowingly. His late-morning visits to Sondra’s room were an open secret in the house. They all assumed Jim and Sondra spent their cloistered time together having sex, and Jim got the impression that everyone found their behavior both admirable, since it reflected a definite commitment to the Exalted Here and the Eternal Now, and quaint, since they could have just been fucking in the hot tub with everybody else.
Fully dressed, Sondra was lying on top of her covers when he knocked. She patted a spot next to her. Jim took off his shoes and lay down.
“So where were we?” she asked.
“Anaheim,” he said. “In ’Seventy-six.”
“Oh yes!” she said. “Disneyland on the Bicentennial! Joe was so crabby.”
“But he wasn’t generally crabby, was he?”
“Oh no,” she said. “He got crabby like other people got colds. A few times a year and mostly in winter. And most of the time I always felt like it had nothing to do with me. Or with us. He’d go in and come out of the mood all by himself. And that time, at Disneyland, he got himself out of the mood with a pair of damned mouse ears. He brought them up to the desk to get monogrammed and then put them on his head and walked out of the store without paying for them. When I asked him why he did it he said he was angry that Nixon got pardoned. I said, ‘Joe, that was two years ago, and that was Ford, and you just stole from Walt Disney.’ And he said, ‘Honey, sometimes the Man is the Man.’ What do you think about that?”
“He sounds like a wonderfully complicated person,” Jim said.
“He wasn’t complicated to me,” Sondra said, staring at the ceiling and looking thoughtful. She put an arm across her eyes and sighed. “You know what, darling,” she said. “I’m not sure I can get it up today. Why don’t you talk for a little while.”
“All right,” Jim said, though he was really there for Sondra to talk. It was good for her, to elaborate all these memories, even though to anyone else in the house it would look like he was just indulging her nostalgia, since she wasn’t doing anything to contain the memories let alone destroy them, and in fact she told some of her stories over and over. They just burbled out of her, and then disappeared for a while from their conversations, until they came burbling out again. It was surely a first step for her, he thought.
For him, it was like getting to be a chaplain again. That was a habit of his old life, he knew, something he wasn’t supposed to be holding on to. In fact, he had been forgetting his favorite patients all week long, and he knew it wouldn’t be too long before he forgot he had ever been a chaplain at all. But talking with Sondra right now helped him with his own work. It helped him to call up his own memories, to get them ready to go into his book. Often he’d take whatever he’d just told Sondra to his office, and if she asked him the next day to continue the story about (for instance) his grandfather’s candy store, Jim would have no idea what she was talking about. But lately, Sondra was mostly interested in hearing about Jane.
He looked up at the ceiling and folded his hands on his belly. “Jane was always mistaking her emotions. You know, like a toddler who thinks he’s angry when he’s actually just terribly sleepy.”
“I never had one of those,” Sondra said. “A toddler, I mean.”
“Me neither,” Jim said. “But you know what I mean. She’d think she was anxious when she was actually angry. Or think she was angry when she ought to have been depressed. With most people it’s the other way around, you know. Show me a depressed person and I’ll show you someone who just needs to go punch somebody in the face.”
“I don’t think they have depressed people anymore, darling,” she said. “Except me. And maybe you. Are you depressed?”
“Just sad,” Jim said. “I think it’s just how the . . . process makes you feel. You know? The emptying out. That can feel like sadness, but it’s not sadness. It’s just . . .”
“Eternal desolation?” she said.
Jim almost grinned. But then he got a better hold on himself, and on his pastoral authority. “Anticipation,” he said. “Isn’t this what they would all want for us? To be happy and free?”
“They don’t want anything anymore,” Sondra said. “They’re dead. All that’s left is memories. Maybe it would be easier if we could just betray them, but it’s too late for that, right?” She sighed expansively. “Sorry. I think maybe I just need to try something a little different, you know? Like maybe gardening should just be to make the salad. And for remembering and all that other stuff, for getting rid of it . . . something else.”
“Like what?” Jim asked.
“Macramé?” she said. “Lassoing? Who knows?” She stretched and yawned. “Anyway, all this personal-growth talk is exhausting. Let’s just cuddle some, huh?”
“Sure,” said Jim, opening up his arm so she could put her head on his shoulder. She nestled against him like a puppy, but just as Jim drifted off to sleep, she said, “I just keep thinking of Jason. You know, Frank’s partner. Once upon a time Frank lay right here and talked about him. And now Franklin’s gone. And you know what that means?”
No, Jim said innocently. What does it mean? But he wasn’t actually speaking. He tried hard to clamber up out of drowsiness, but when he woke it was late in the afternoon and he was alone in her room.
Sondra wasn’t at tea, or evening calisthenics, which he’d never known her to miss, but Jim didn’t start to wonder where she was until dinner. He sat quietly at the table drinking wine and trying to figure out how to introduce Jane into his book—what scene from their life could he finally start with?—but he was increasingly distracted by Sondra’s absence. At first he was just a little worried about her, but then he started to feel very strongly that she was not just missing but gone to her Debut. He said as much to Folly, who was sitting nearest to him.
“Then I congratulate her,” Folly said stiffly.
Or maybe you’re just jealous, Jim wanted to say. But instead he said, “Something wonderful has
happened.” And Folly said, “Indeed.” So that refrain went around the table. But the Alices looked reserved, and his own Alice said that no one had ever left the house for the city in the evening before, and Sondra’s Alice only shrugged emphatically when Jim’s Alice whispered something to her. When they had all gathered in the great room after dinner, he saw his Alice and Sondra’s Alice slipping away and followed them. “But couldn’t she just have departed without you noticing?” he asked when he caught up with them.
Sondra’s Alice shrugged, and his Alice said it would be very unusual.
Then maybe, he said, she just had a headache. Or maybe she had gone to the city in a unique manner because she was a unique person And then he said maybe she was gardening at night, and that before they knew it she’d be doing something amazing like gardening on the walls or in the air. But he knew before they got to her room that when he had said something wonderful had happened he had just been too afraid to say that he really had meant something horrible, and he was already crying before they knocked open her door, and before they found her alone in her bed, and well before he saw how she’d used an old-fashioned straight razor (and what was one of those even doing in the future) to cut her own throat down to the bone.
There wasn’t actually a bomb, and Jane, if she made it all the way into the Polaris Dewar of Dewars, need not actually blow them all up, or sacrifice her own life to reclaim her husband’s dignity. It was just a little powder Hecuba called the Kiss. All Jane had to do was puff it into a piece of the cryonics technology, and the rest was all small molecules riding on microscopic winds of chaos, getting in where they didn’t belong, thawing heads and, if you believed in that sort of thing, setting captive spirits free. It was Medea666, a university chemist in her offline life, who made it.
Jane didn’t say anything to Brian about applying; she just filled out the preliminary forms, which were more a declaration of interest than anything, a few pages of ordinary questions about her background and health that reminded her of hospital credentialing paperwork. Only at the very end was there anything like an essay question: In 120 characters or fewer, please tell us why you deserve to live forever.
She might have written, Because I am terrified of death. But she wrote, Because no one deserves to die, which was what Hecuba had told her to write.
Now we wait, Hecuba said after Jane submitted her preliminary application. It can take up to six weeks to process, so don’t worry about rejection until then. We usually make it past this stage. It’s the next one that kills us. But that same day Brian sent her a text, just a beaming smiley with his eyes screwed tight with pleasure.
A small box arrived. Inside there was a shiny silver thumb drive, labeled with the blue Polaris pyramid. Are you sure this is safe? Jane asked Hecuba before she inserted the drive. What if it’s a trap? Or it spies on us?
They’re far too arrogant to ever doubt your interest. Do it.
She plugged the drive into her laptop and when the icon appeared—it was another Polaris pyramid—she opened it. Her computer asked her if she was quite sure she wanted to open the program, because it was from an unrecognized source, and Jane hesitated again, but clicked yes. Her screen went dark for a moment before it turned Polaris blue. Jane pushed a few buttons in a panic, trying to get her desktop back, but her computer only responded by turning on its fan and making a long trill of high clicks. She stabbed at the escape button, and then pulled the plug, but the computer had a nearly full battery and didn’t notice. An animation was starting in the distance of the flat blue field. Jane had just remembered to push the power button when a woman’s face suddenly rushed to the foreground.
“Greetings and salutations!” the woman said, smiling as she spoke. “Greetings and salutations!” she said again, then closed her eyes in a long blink. “Please state your full name.” Jane hesitated. The woman asked again, so Jane told her.
“Text input!” the woman exclaimed. “Dr. Jane Julia Cotton Polaris Aspirant Number 617.460.666, welcome to Part Two of your application for membership at Polaris. My name is Alice. This is a virtual interview, which should take between fifteen and twenty hours to complete but may be terminated at any time. Shall we begin?” Her blind eyes searched the room for thirty seconds while Jane hesitated. “Shall we begin?” she repeated.
“Sure.”
“There are no right or wrong answers,” Alice said. “This is merely a process of discernment.”
“Are you a robot?” Jane asked.
“I am not a robot,” Alice replied, so quickly that Jane was sure everyone must ask that question. “I am a recording algorithm and a speaking face. All decisions regarding membership are made by the Polaris Membership Board, which receives my reports via continuous feed. Please tell me about the animals in your life. Pay special attention to pets, but do not exclude any animal to which you have had a strong positive or negative emotional attachment.”
“What has this got to do with the future?”
“All information is relevant to the future,” Alice snapped.
She’s very testy, Jane wrote later to Hecuba. Be nice, Hecuba wrote back. We need you to get close to the dewars. So you have to be nice to all of them! So the next day, when Brian called to leave his customary message, Jane picked up the phone.
“I’m so sorry for my negative tone before,” she said to him. “I suppose I took my anger out on you, but really I just miss my husband. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course,” Brian said. “Of course I do. And now . . . and now you can . . .” His voice caught in his throat and he began to softly cry.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“Please don’t apologize. I’m just so happy to be able to finally help.”
“But is it okay that you’re talking to me, now that I’m making an application?”
“There’s no conflict of interest. I’m the director of family services, but I sit on the admissions board, too, and sometimes I wear both hats.”
“Did you take Jim’s application?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just trying to understand what he saw in you,” she said, too harshly. So she added, “I mean, I think I know, but I want to be sure.”
“He saw the future in us,” Brian said. “And now—” His voice caught again, but he mastered himself. “And now he’s waiting for you.”
Jane didn’t respond to that. She only said she had better get back to the application, meaning she had to get back to Alice, though as it went on over the next couple of days, it felt to her more like all three of them—Alice, Hecuba, and Brian—were interviewing her at the same time, and when she went to bed at night she found herself muttering to them indiscriminately, in the space between waking and sleep.
At hour eleven of the application, Alice asked, “If you could send a message to the future, what would it be?” Then it was Jane’s turn to cry, so she was glad Alice’s blind eyes could not discern her tears. Her mind filled with all the things she might say to Jim, if she could believe for a minute that he was alive somewhere on the other side of time. She pondered over an answer, attempting to ignore the desperate accusations and shrill questions that came immediately to mind—Always together, never apart! and What am I supposed to do now? and Why? Why? Why?
“Are you still thinking about the question?” Alice asked, and Jane settled on I hope you are all very well indeed.
“Do you really believe we’re going to wake up?” Jane asked Brian. She knew he wanted her to ask that, and that she could ask it as many times as she wanted. It was like asking a Jehovah’s Witness whether they really believed that Jesus was their Personal Savior.
“As certainly as I believe I myself will wake up tomorrow morning.”
“But you might die in the night,” Jane said.
“If I did, a Polaris team would be at my house five minutes after my heart stopped beating. And then I would sleep just a little longer. It�
��s one of the advantages of living on campus, but we hope that one day everyone in the world will be so close to a doorway.”
Doorway! Jane wrote to Hecuba. They’re living in a graveyard!
It’s a cult, Hecuba wrote. Of course they say things like that.
But do you think it could possibly be true?
Who cares? Not me. I might almost forgive them for mutilating Albert’s body, but they mutilated the very idea of my marriage, and for that I’m going to destroy them if it’s the last thing I do.
At hour seventeen, Alice asked, “What is the purpose of life?” And Jane thought of all the things she could say that would immediately end her application: The purpose of life is to not think too much about the future or The purpose of life is to do justice to the past or The purpose of life is to die one day. Or even: That’s not really something you ever really know, except temporarily, the answer changes as your life changes or That’s not something you know in just your head, it’s something you figure out, day by day, in relation to one other really important person. These were all things that Jim had actually said to her, at one time or another. But she knew that none of them could have been what he had said to Polaris. Barely any of it was really amenable to articulation, anyway. “Do you need more time for the question?” Alice asked, and Jane said, “Yes, please.”
She couldn’t write: I try not to think about this sort of thing without my husband around, though that was still the truth. Or even, Life doesn’t have any purpose now that my husband is dead. Alice asked her a few more times if she needed more time, and Jane pressed her snooze button while she tried out her answers in pencil on the back of a grocery receipt. She wished she had time to call Hecuba, but Alice was starting to seem impatient, the intervals between her repetitions steadily decreasing. So at last Jane went with what seemed like her best answer.
The purpose of life, she wrote, is to live more life. Alice closed her eyes and looked thoughtful for a moment. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but Jane thought it must have been forever, in computer time.
