The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  The New World

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Cover

  Dedications

  Inner Cover

  1.1

  1.2

  1.3

  1.4

  1.5

  1.6

  1.7

  1.8

  1.9

  1.10

  1.11

  1.12

  1.13

  1.14

  1.15

  1.16

  1.17

  1.18

  Cycle Two

  2.1

  2.2

  2.3

  2.4

  2.5

  2.6

  2.7

  2.8

  2.9

  Cycle Three

  3.1

  Chris Adrian was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” He is the author of three novels, The Great Night, Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He lives in New York City where he works as a pediatric oncologist.

  Eli Horowitz is the cocreator of The Silent History and one-third of Ying Horowitz & Quinn. Previously, he was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney’s. He is the coauthor of The Clock Without a Face and Everything You Know Is Pong. He lives in San Francisco.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  THE NEW WORLD. Copyright © 2014 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn LLC and Chris Adrian. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Atavist Books, 555 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011.

  ISBN: 9781937894320

  Cover design: Chip Kidd, Russell Quinn

  Interaction design: Russell Quinn, Eli Horowitz

  For more information about Atavist Books and to sign up to receive updates about this and other titles, please visit: atavist.com/atavistbooks/.

  For Rachel and Jason and Shirley and Larry.

  Jim collapsed and died at the hospital where he and Jane both worked, she as a pediatric surgeon and he as a chaplain—a humanist chaplain, as he liked to remind everyone. Jane was on a flight home from a conference in Paris, fast asleep in transatlantic tranquillity. After the plane landed, her phone stumbled over itself, the notifying chimes and vibrations interrupting each other as soon as she turned it on. There was a message from Jim, sent hours ago. So she was tricked, for half a second, into thinking he was fine. Then she saw all the other texts, and all the voice mails. Jane’s seatmate, a hair-helmeted blond lady, laid a hand on Jane’s arm and said, “Oh, something terrible has happened, hasn’t it?”

  “My husband is sick,” Jane said, though she already believed, from the volume and tone of the messages, that he must be dead. While Jane tried to return every call, her seatmate pushed with her through the cab line at JFK, yelling, “Out of the way! Can’t you people see this is an emergency?”

  No one picked up, not even Jane’s mother. “Why isn’t anyone answering?” she asked her seatmate calmly as they came to the head of the line. This was Jane’s version of hysteria. Another person might already be weeping and shouting or rolling in silent anguish on the sidewalk, knowing what Jane knew, but she only mumbled at a stranger and kept walking forward.

  “I just don’t know, honey,” the lady said, and then she was opening the cab door and gently pushing Jane in. The lady gave the driver stern instructions, then came back to press her palm earnestly against the window. Jane pressed her hand to the glass as well. She too must have a dead husband, Jane said to herself, because it seemed so much like a gesture of solidarity.

  “Can’t you go any faster?” Jane asked, once the cab was on the highway. “It’s an emergency. My husband is very ill.”

  “I am so sorry,” the driver said, shrugging and indicating the traffic with his hands.

  “I’m sorry too,” Jane said, and stared at her phone for a few more minutes before she asked, “Don’t you have a light or a siren?” It made such sense to her in that moment—people had emergencies in taxis all the time. Babies were born in taxis. One had been born somewhere on the bqe just the other week. “For emergencies?”

  “No,” the driver said gently. “We are not allowed.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said, leaning her head against the window. She imagined rolling it down and making a wailing siren of her mouth and her head, and she could see the cartoon image very clearly—her neck stretched impossibly long and her eyes flashing and spinning, one red and one blue, her lips oversize and overdefined, wrapping sensuously around every howling O up the Grand Central Parkway and clearing a path. “Now we are making better time,” the driver said, and “Now we are making good time,” and “Now we are almost there!” even when they weren’t. Jane didn’t say anything else. When they finally did arrive, she pushed some money at him without counting it, and went inside. Striding carefully toward one of the resuscitation bays, she tried to keep her face solemn and still, though it felt like something—phantom fingers or two blunt fists—was pushing at her lips and cheeks to force them into a terrified, snarling smile.

  For a moment she thought Jim must still be alive, because she recognized a vigorous code when she saw one. She even detected a note of hopefulness in all the bustle, before she saw the wife in the corner of the room, before she saw the patient’s single square toe visible through the surrounding bodies, and before she understood that she had just presented herself as the star of somebody else’s emergency. The toe was dark brown. The widow-in-waiting, getting harassed or comforted by the chaplain, was a tall Asian lady with sunglasses pushed back on her head. “Jane!” said the chaplain, a colleague of her husband’s named Dick. The er attending at the head of the bed called out her name as well. Jane backed out of the room waving her hands in some gesture she had never made before, meant to represent an apology particular to the horror and farce of the situation. She collided with Maureen, her surgical colleague and friend, who turned her around and embraced her.

  “Holy shit, Jane,” she said, but gently. “Holy shit!”

  “What happened?” Jane asked, pulling away. “Where is he?” Dick was fluttering behind her, but she wasn’t listening to whatever he was saying.

  “It was a saddle embolus,” Maureen said. “He’s upstairs. They closed off part of recovery for you.”

  “Recovery? He was in surgery? Someone took it out? Who did it? Who tried?”

  “Not that. It was too late for that.” Maureen took her away down the hall to stand in the charting area, where everyone within distance of ordinary hearing quietly got up and walked away. Dick was still aflutter, repeatedly touching his lips and his heart, and now Jane could hear him saying her name and Jim’s over and over. She put a hand on him to make him still and another on Maureen, clutching hard at her biceps. “It was the Polaris people,” Maureen said. “They were already here for someone else, so they took him while he was still on bypass.”

  “The who people? Took him where? To surgery?”

  “Polaris. The cryo people. Holy shit, Jane. I assisted. I feel like I should apologize, but I figured you would want someone to make sure they didn’t fuck it up.”

  “Fuck what up? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh Jesus,” Maureen said, trying to back away, but Jane wouldn’t let her go. “You don’t know?”

  “It’s what I’ve been saying about the surprise,” Dick murmured, stroking Jane’s hand. “He di
dn’t tell me, either. But in a way, in a really particular way, something wonderful has happened.”

  “What?” Jane said, and then she was shouting again, and she could not understand what they were saying to her, no matter how plainly they told it, until they led her to Jim’s body (and it was definitely his body, for she uncovered it and immediately recognized his fat pink nipples, his round belly, and his short legs and stubby, hairy toes) and showed her how the Polaris people, whoever they were, had taken away his head.

  In darkness, he understood these words: Greetings and salutations! Except the words were not exactly spoken, and Jim did not exactly hear them. Once upon a time he had wondered aggressively what it would be like to hear voices, and tried to imagine his way into the head of the psychiatry patients who always insisted that the boxes of tissues or the window blinds were piteously weeping and who asked, when he tried to pray with them, why no one ever wanted to minister to the inanimate, who needed and wanted it more than most of the living could ever know or understand. Is this what that’s like? he asked himself now, realizing, as he asked this one, that there were other, more pressing questions. So, in the absence of a mouth and a tongue, in the absence of air, he asked, Am I alive?

  You have always been alive, he was told. But now you are awake.

  He remembered, in a very remote and stale way, a great panic at dying, and asking someone—not God, of course—for just a few more minutes, and he remembered how he had understood in his body that he wasn’t going to get them. Much fresher than the memory of dying was a memory of terrible, terrible pain, and he tried to decide whether he had simply been dreaming of pain, or if it was agony to come back to life, or if the pain of dying could not abate if you never actually died, or if he had simply been in some kind of Hell. He supposed it didn’t matter, so he decided not to ask.

  Who are you? Jim asked. Where am I? Why can’t I see you?

  There are short answers and long answers to all those questions. Which would you prefer to hear? There is time for either or both.

  Let’s start with the short ones.

  I am your (social worker). You are at (Polaris). And you are not trying hard enough to see me.

  (Social worker)? Jim asked.

  Yes. It is a word you know, but it does not entirely suit the present context. Hence (social worker).

  (Polaris)? You mean, it worked?

  Of course.

  It really worked? I’m really alive?

  You have always been alive.

  He thought to himself, I am alive!, very subtly aware, in this new state of being, how thinking to himself was different from (speaking). Alive in the future! How about that? He waited some period of time—it was hard to tell if it was a minute or a month—to feel excited or exultant, but the notion of life remained only merely supremely interesting.

  But am I all here? I don’t feel entirely like myself. Or am I on some kind of drug, maybe a tranquilizer? Because I’m in the hospital?

  You are not on drugs. Neither are you in a hospital. But you are here and not here. Right now, you are only the leaven of your connectome.

  My what?

  Your connectome. The totality of your neurological connections. Your quantum self.

  I don’t think I understand.

  Of course you don’t. We are getting ahead of ourselves.

  I see. He paused another (moment). And why can’t I see anything? Did you tell me that I’m not trying hard enough to see you?

  I did tell you that. But I should have said not trying at all. There is a short and a long solution to that problem. Would you like the short solution first?

  Yes, please.

  The short solution is try harder.

  Try harder? Like to wake up?

  You were never asleep. You won’t fully understand until you make your (Debut).

  My (Debut)? Like cotillion? Or like on Broadway?

  It is the culmination of the third and final cycle by which the leaven of your connectome expands to inhabit every space of your personality within a new body, learns and forgets what it must know and cannot know to live in the future, and joins with us in fellowship. The sequence is thus: (Incarnation); (Examination); (Debut).

  I don’t understand!

  Yes. There you go again.

  Getting ahead of ourselves?

  Indeed. You should ignore everything but the one thing. Do you remember what that one thing is?

  Trying harder? To see you?

  Yes, exactly.

  Jim noted the absence of eyelids to shut tight, or hands to squeeze into fists, or buttocks and a jaw to clench—everything he was accustomed to doing when he was really trying at something. Instead, he tried to muster their interior equivalents, opening a door in his mind onto scenes of struggle: squats and jerks and lifting a corner of the refrigerator, and arguments with the head of the hospital about funding for the Clinical Pastoral Education program, all times when he was full to bursting with what he wanted. And yet all of these interior equivalents felt, as he deployed them, like they were not enough. He tried another sort of effort—it felt like what he did when he was praying as hard as he could, which he had once described to a nonhumanist chaplain who had expressed doubt that somebody who didn’t believe in God could pray, as an effort like internal pooping. That was better, divorced, as it was, from physical effort, which was clearly the wrong thing to bring to bear on this situation. But now, instead of having a general sense of being suspended in darkness that was neither warm nor cold but without any temperature at all, Jim was falling.

  Falling became an occasion for panic, but it also offered him a first lesson in how he must proceed. He wished he had taken a little more time just to chat with his (social worker), since it was clear to him that he was failing now because he was trying, falling only because he had conceived of the space through which he could fall. He thought of a rope, and there it was, at once an idea and a mental object. The rope wasn’t enough to stop him falling—he slipped from knot to knot to knot. But now he had shown himself the distance between try and do, and offered himself a solution: if he wanted to see her, he must conceive of her. Except what he really meant was (conceive), since what seemed clearly called for was a different kind of thinking and conceiving, a different kind of mental effort, than he was used to, some kind never needed before by anybody and so at the very least unused throughout the history of man, if not actually uncreated. And if this was the short solution to his problem, Jim was suddenly afraid of finding out what the long one might be.

  But then, (grasping) the last knot on his rope, there came a flash of light. It was exactly the sort of light that explodes in your interior perception when you stand up into an open cabinet and smack your head, or someone punches you in the eyeball. He pulled himself up, quickly exhausting not just the rope, but the very idea of pulling. He (moved) into notions of pushing and twisting and thrusting, and from there to notion-motions for which he had no name except (dance): tense, generative gestures that seemed to create not just the space but the sheltering dimensions through which he traveled. And each gesture was part of a loud, conscious fuss over enormous concepts: NO I don’t want to die and YES let me see your face, let me see your body and my body, and LET ME SEE THIS NEW WORLD! There was color in the light, and then the light and color bled profusely, establishing and populating Jim’s whole field of vision.

  He was outside, on a farm. There was the house, and the barn, and the silo, and the big blue bowl of sky with clouds in the shape of elephants and castles and whales. What a beautiful world! And there was his new friend—he thought she looked beautiful before he thought she looked strange—sitting patiently above him at the center of a silvery web, waving four arms and blinking at him with very tiny but truly luminous blue eyes.

  Greetings and salutations! she said.

  Jane’s reverend mother presided over Jim’s funeral, which was not at all the service he had asked for. Jane barely had attention for any of the details, but she was periph
erally aware of her mother shouting at Jim’s friends when they called to complain. Jim had wanted a pagan Viking service, complete with basso chanting and a flammable boat set alight with a fire arrow as it drifted away from the mourners. Instead of that, her mother had arranged a Unitarian Universalist service heavily inflected with her native Congregational elements, though Jane’s mother said over and over to Jim’s friends that she would keep mention of Jesus to a minimum. Once Jane talked briefly with Dick—he called just as she picked up the phone to continue her assault on Polaris Cryonics Incorporated. “We all promised him,” Dick had said. “You promised him it would be a certain way, and now you are breaking your promise.”

  “Well,” Jane had replied, “he broke a promise too, didn’t he?” She meant his marriage vows, one of which had been, at Jim’s own insistence, that the two of them would remain together beyond death. At first that just meant they would be eternity to each other. Then, later, Jane understood it to mean they would cleave to each other beyond the efforts of their individual experiences of grief (past, present, and future) to drive them apart. Which it did try to do, over and over, and yet they always managed (sometimes triumphantly, she would like to say) to muddle through. Always together, never apart was what they had promised, even if they never quite permanently vanquished their respective intimacy issues. But now Jane was quite sure that remaining together beyond death meant nothing at all if it didn’t mean that neither of them would sign up alone for an afterlife—and never mind that it was as fake and stupid as any scheme of ordinary religion. The whole terrible surprise of this Polaris Incident, as her mother liked to call it, felt somehow like Jim had left her for somebody else, like infidelity added to death. If she thought for a minute that he would understand, Jane might have tried to tell these things to Dick, before her mother took the phone away from her and hung up on him.