The Not Yet

by Moira Crone

  She was hugely offended when I laughed. Her long lie to me now exposed, that last thread, burned away in an instant. I was free. My freedom was the name of that laugh. I was free. “How could you not have told me?”

  “You are going to enter the Reveal, you are going—once you do you will understand the sense of keeping all that at bay, you will, you won’t see the world as you do now. Not at all. We are different. You are my son, but if you stay like this, you will—you still wouldn’t be who you are. We are actually formed by what we don’t know—why probe? What’s the use?”

  “You knew? You were my mother? You let me promise—”

  “I imagined—” she said. “From the first time I saw you. Then there were your tests. I already said this. Do I have to go over it?”

  “From my looks?”

  “If you must know,” she sighed. “You look a great deal like John. At first, this was unconscious. I couldn’t have known, or even imagined. But then I heard more and more about the West Florida remnants, and so I entertained the idea. Oh, this is so unpleasant. You have his height, his build. Really, if you think about it, it’s such a fateful, surprising, marvelous—maybe I did know from the beginning—”

  Then she was angry because I stood up, and I was walking over toward the French doors, the ones she’d come through that day when she said she wanted some of our dinner. “Well are you going to be some kind of hysteric, with an antique prejudice? You are not a Nat. You’ve practically been to Memphis. Besides, the Salamanders don’t get this vision clearly until they are twenty-six or twenty-seven. We can stop you before—you are so well suited to help me with the research! Who better!”

  I saw, then, a large boat anchored at a great distance out the window. A helicopter buzzing overhead, the size of a bumble bee on the horizon but coming our way.

  “How could it matter to you? These entanglements don’t matter, the things John made me do, they don’t matter—we don’t have to live in consequences. We are going beyond them. We aren’t Nats. But what if we were? Look how you cling to that unfortunate event with Lazarus! Look at what grief is! Cast something over it. Forget its face, its contours. Is that not natural? That angel is natural, she comes and gives you forgetting. Is that not the truth? It’s something good, that John manipulated it away? What if what John did is the greatest curse? If you see how life really is, when it burns down to black, or when you are squeezed out of it or back into it, some flailing pitiful baby, vulnerable—how could you go on at all?” She touched the place above my lip. “You don’t have to remember coming into this body, you don’t remember where you were before, you don’t—the filter, the philtrum, is natural, and John etched that out. What he’s done is wrong. It’s against—is that not natural, to want a perimeter between yourself and that pain? That’s the whole point. Albers knew—”

  I shook my head no. No.

  “You will have years—years, our therapies are intricate, sublime—”

  “I am not getting Treated,” I said. “I’m going away.” I felt the ground beneath me steadying.

  “How could you? Are you mad? Not be Treated?”

  “Not be Treated.”

  She sat down and took it in. “Oh, that Nat prejudice. It doesn’t matter! I can’t believe you would care!” But she knew I meant it. As if she had expected this all along, she regained her composure. She told me I was being an idiot, romantic, and romanticism was idiotic, as there was no such thing as “ceasing upon the midnight with no pain.” She even said, “You are a show off. Hah! So was your father.”

  Of all the things she told me that day, that was the one I liked the most.

  I told her, simply, no. I didn’t even ask her, ‘How can you take your son for your lover? How do you do that?’

  “Heirs are eternal, we’ve no low rules, you don’t see, you poor boy, you don’t—” But, she was, for a moment, defeated, resigned. “You will regret this forever, not coming with me. When you are lying on your bed and saying goodbye, so long, no matter what you see, you will regret it,” she said.

  I sensed she was a bit cowed by the fact of who I was. Of our relation, exposed. I knew she would have always kept it from me. It didn’t serve her purposes for me to know.

  The WELLFI copter came in close. It opened its door, lowered a harness. Called for her. It was quite sudden, in a way. Abrupt.

  I helped her out onto the deck outside the kitchen. She let me lift her into the stiff, fortified straps. They lowered a helmet. I strapped her in. I didn’t think about touching her. With her big gold false eyes she looked up at me, pleadingly. I signaled they could haul her up.

  There she was, my mother, dangling in the air, her new hands long claws in her lap. I wasn’t used to any of it yet. But it was all very true.

  *

  And two minutes later, she was settled into her swinging seat, being hoisted up, up into the WELLVAC helicopter. She had yielded, before, but now at the last moment, she was chatting and talking as rapidly, as fondly, as when I first came in. As if there were still a chance for me to change my mind. The odd thing was, she was no longer beside me. I was still standing on the docks outside the kitchen. There was a patch of the watery marsh—ever widening—between us and a good twenty feet of sky. She was swinging in the air and completely ignoring the fact. Two at the top were waiting to receive her, and unstrap her, fly her away to the ship at the horizon, rescue her.

  I was waving goodbye. But she wouldn’t stop talking.

  “You really aren’t coming? How crazy are you?” she shouted as she drew closer and closer to the open machine. “How can it matter what we are as Nats? Heirs don’t have the categories, mother, son, father, daughter—these are absurd, I can’t believe!” She was yelling over the sound of the blades. It was possible I would never see her again. I didn’t want that to be true.

  The attendants above didn’t understand. One screamed down through a megaphone: “We have a place for you—she’s your holder? She reserved two seats! We got the authorization to take a non-Heir!”

  I shook my head and shouted, “NO!”

  She was inside the copter, then, in the doorway, being lifted out of the straps. As it rose, she was getting harder and harder to comprehend, with the sound of the sea and the motor, and the wind of the blades, which took her speech and broke it down into small parts, like the feathers flying off of a bird. She was being shuffled back into her safety, her envelope. She was being cloaked and covered—being swaddled, carried off, nursed and cared for.

  Yet, I felt as if I were being born.

  She said I was a fool. I yelled back, “Yes, I am a fool!” Oh, I would miss her, her intellect, her curiosity, her bravery. It was my mother’s bravery. And I would be brave. I remembered Serpent’s knife, opened it, found the wire cutters, and, in a gesture I hoped she could still see, I clipped away my collar, tossed it out into the roiling waves.

  “You fool! You will regret forever!” she screamed, but the words fell into little bits, only the feeling, which was a sort of love.

  But, then, at the last, as I watched her, and as the helicopter hovered over the gray rough water—something happened I could not have predicted.

  First, there was a sort of shudder in the air, as if some kind of depth, or thickness, had been added. At the same time, a form, like a shroud, a veil, came away. It was invisible, nevertheless, I saw it with an inner eye as it peeled back.

  And, then, all at once, at least for me, for Malcolm de Lazarus, for that one man, with his limits, his outline, his tale, this: the air, and the sky, merged—the wood of the pier and the crisp fabric of my jacket, the air going in and out of my mouth, my anger at her, and my adoration of her, and the terror and thrill I felt at the future, and the soft face of my Camille and the journey we had dared to imagine—became all one single thing. My life so far, and in the future, collapsed, closed in—all the boundaries were lines that led to this one instant. There was only the moment, which was a passage, an opening. This was not simple, it was
not painless. It was almost too much to know.

  I saw a single wave that all was a part of, and I was part of it, as well as watching it. It went through me, even as I observed it. This was not a contradiction. The perimeter was porous. The boundary, no boundary, only a winding line, a path, just then—

  Her last words to me I could make out: “But you want to live forever. Don’t you? Everyone does. Don’t lie, you can’t lie—”

  “Of course I do, of course!” I said with my own voice. “I do.”

  Then, in my wounded ear, I heard the roar.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Rodger, first, for his constancy, his love, and his idea of hero.

  Thanks to Laura Mullen, Lady of the Resurrection, for a vision of the whole brought to me out of friendship.

  And to the editors and agents and fellow authors who helped it along the way:

  Ralph Adamo and Chris Chambers of New Orleans Review, Anne Gisleson of Intersections, Joshua Ellisson of Habitus, Valerie Martin, Stuart Dybek, Rosellen Brown, and Ellen Levine.

  And to the Louisiana Board of Regents for the ATLAS grant to complete this work.

  And to Bill Lavender, for taking this chance.

  Praise for The Not Yet

  “This fully realized and expertly rendered vision of the future has much to show us about the here and now. The Not Yet is a provocative contemplation of what it means to live in a world of haves and have-nots, in which the desire for longevity and beauty has overtaken good sense and human longing matters even as it is thwarted. It is also a great story—the kind that keeps you up late because you want to know what happens.”

  —Elise Blackwell

  “A vivid, suspenseful, and (literally) layered imagining of what’s to become of New Orleans and humanity (a new kind of love?) in the Twenty-Second Century.”

  —Roy Blount Jr.

  “New Orleans has always been an island, and in Moira Crone’s new novel, The Not Yet, the island is literal and the city is flooded for eternity. New Orleans has always been a crossing of worlds visible and invisible, and in Crone’s lyrical prose the intersection includes the future and aliens and transformations beyond our dreams. New Orleans has always signified decadence and death for our gothic region of the South, and Crone’s story begins with a boatman ferrying something very much like a dead man into a place very much like the land of the dead. New Orleans has always created monsters, so why not Crone’s race of Heirs, superbeings who hold Creoles and Cajuns as pets. To classify this novel in any way would detract from its ability to resonate on many levels, as myth, as high literature, as science fiction, as fantasy, with the hints of a graphic novel in the rich imagery and finely honed writing. Malcolm’s odyssey, like a good gumbo, cannot be described but begs to be tasted. I have not read a more compelling novel in a very long time.”

  —Jim Grimsley

  “Moira Crone’s simple observation that New Orleanians, like people everywhere, really want to live forever, clearly leads into a world of ethical marvels, perversities hitherto undreamed of. Her narrator, an ambitious outsider, a pure Dickensian foundling, is perfectly situated to guide the reader on a revelatory journey to where we are headed right now.”

  —Valerie Martin

  “You are an Heir. You are part of an elite who know the secret to longevity. Your purpose is to live forever in phenomenal wealth. You eat tasteless nothings to maintain your perfectly sculpted, synthetic body. You love when and if it is appropriate. But if you are Malcolm, the Not-Yet of Moira Crone’s futuristic novel, you see the Heirs as the “bonesnakes” they are, you hunger for real food, and you want to love Camille, who can never be an Heir. How much are you willing to risk, what sacrifices will you make? Your fortune? Your future? Your life? The Not Yet is adventure, fantasy and romance. Most of all, it is Crone’s brilliant vision of life in the New Orleans Islands a century after Katrina. Once you are taken into its powerful grip, you will see that the world she describes may be no father away than the next great flood.”

  —Chris Wiltz

  “Moira Crone has written a deeply strange novel of a dystopian New Orleans of the future—troubling, vividly imagined, audacious,and utterly unlike anything else you will read this year, or next.”

  —Tom Piazza

  “When Moira Crone’s The Not Yet is read in 2121, the year in which much of this wildly inventive novel is set, its readers will ask of us, ‘If you knew enough about what was coming to have books like this, why didn’t you do something about it?’ And they’ll be right, for The Not Yet sounds an awful lot like The Pretty Soon.”

  —John Biguenet

  “Moira Crone’s The Not Yet is as thought-provoking as a novel can get. Set in a future dystopian New Orleans that is run by people who think they have figured out how to live forever, the story contains echoes of Jonathan Swift. It’s a captivating meditation on the curious way love springs out of what we give up in life, not what we gain.”

  —Tim Gautreaux

  “From her vast and tasty imagination, Moira Crone has fashioned a post-apocalyptic picaresque to rival Riddley Walker and Fiskadoro. In The Not Yet, her foundling Malcolm navigates a bizarre, fallen New Orleans as strange and wonderful as the real one.”

  —Stewart O’Nan

  Praise for Moira Crone

  “One of our finest writers…”

  —Robert Olen Butler

  “…utterly sui generis.”

  —Gary Krist

  “Precise and hallucinatory at the same time.”

  —Lee Smith

  “Crone charts a zone of family resemblance and family claustrophobia. Her work can be hilarious in dealing with contemporary moral relativism; but it always holds true to abiding faith in certain primitive, reassuring pleasures. The writer’s ability to find language that approximates extreme emotional states lifts her work far above most mere quotidian realism. Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart for her beleaguered, if often witty, characters. Moira Crone’s growing reputation is richly deserved.”

  —Allan Gurganus

  About the Author

  Moira Crone is a fiction writer living in New Orleans. The author of three previous collections including What Gets Into Us, and a novel, A Period of Confinement, her works have appeared in Oxford American, The New Yorker, Image, Mademoiselle, and over forty other journals and twelve anthologies. She has won prizes for her stories and novellas, and in 2009, she was given the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers for the entire body of her work.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Moira Crone

  The Not Yet

  ISBN: 978-1-60801-072-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012931179

  (Electronic Edition ISBN: 978-1-60801-077-6)

  Copyright © 2012 by Moira Crone

  Cover photo by the author

  Cover design by Bill Lavender

  Book Design: Allison Reu

  unopress.org

  All rights reserved.

  University of New Orleans Press

  Managing Editor: Bill Lavender