by Chris Adrian
Jane came back for the brochure and the dvd late that night, after staring for an hour at her phone, lying in the dark reading all the news in the world she couldn’t care about, pausing intermittently to look at Brian’s number in her Recents—she wouldn’t do him the honor of making him an actual Contact—but resisting the compulsion to call and shout at him.
At the kitchen table, she set the dvd aside and studied the brochure’s cover, a photograph of the Polaris Pyramid, made entirely of glass. Surely that was the last thing they should make their headquarters out of, if Polaris really was trying to keep things cold in there, but of course if they were actually making soylent green out of their clients, then why not store them all in a giant greenhouse? When she’d glanced at the brochure cover earlier that day, the pyramid had registered as roughly the size of a house, but now she noticed that it utterly dwarfed the surrounding palm and oak trees. There weren’t any people in the picture, which seemed very strange. Shouldn’t they promote themselves like life-insurance companies, who always had pictures of happy old couples, or smiling, orphanable children on their brochures, pictures of hostages, really, since they weren’t so different from the pictures the Mafia might send you of your own family to say, Look at how happy and fragile they are! Hope nothing TERRIBLE happens to them! Except of course Polaris was selling a lie in the form of literal life insurance, and the person who bought that insurance might potentially give hardly a fuck at all for the people they left behind. Why, he might not even tell anyone what he’d done! Go ahead! said that person, whose head was always too warm for comfort, always too firmly attached to his body for his own satisfaction. Let them lose the house! Let them eat food stamps! I don’t care. I’m going to the future. I’m going to Oviedo!
“Oviedo!” Jane said out loud, then added, since her mother wasn’t there, “Jesus fucking Christ!” Polaris Inc. was printed in obtrusive capital letters at the bottom right-hand corner of the brochure. Oviedo, FL. And then she wanted to go upstairs and wake her mother just so she could say to her, Could any place on earth sound more godforsaken than Oviedo, Florida? And her mother might say something like, Surely mothers love their children in Oviedo, too.
At the bottom of the pyramid, in a bold, nacreous space font, they’d written Choose life.
It was bright daytime on the front cover; on the back it was night, but the pyramid was full of light. Jane opened the brochure to the first page, which was all pearl-white text on a background of a color she now officially recognized and hated: Polaris Blue.
And the facing page said simply:
Welcome to Polaris.
Welcome to Our Tomorrows.
Welcome to Abundant Everlasting Life.
Without reading any more, Jane tore the whole thing in half.
“Oh, Jim,” she said. “What did you do?”
She knew better than to watch the dvd; she only stared awhile at its soggy wrapper, wet with chicken fat and stuck all over with the leaves from her mother’s after-dinner tea. Jane could imagine a whole host of people telling her not to look at it: her mother, of course, who didn’t even like an open casket at her funerals, and who would say you ought not to watch something like that until time told you that you absolutely had to, which probably meant never; Maureen would have said it was something akin to operating on your own husband or your child; Dick would say she should watch it only in the company of Jim’s friends, and only with a big bowl of celebratory funereal popcorn. Jim himself would have said she ought only to walk into that sort of trauma hand in hand with him. But she didn’t listen to any of them, or even to herself. This is a terrible idea, she said. She went upstairs with the dvd, the bedroom dark except for the light thrown off by the computer screen. She watched the whole thing once, straight through.
Then she went gliding through the dark house, ostensibly, at first, for a drink of water, though in the bathroom she didn’t even reach for the tap but only stared at her shadowed reflection, trying to discern the expression on her face. And she swept into her mother’s room and stared down a few moments at the sisters in their beds, listening to them breathe the way every parent listened to their child, in worry or wonder. She wandered up and down the stairs, stepping softly and very quietly, trying not to startle herself by making a noise. Then finally she went down to the basement to look at Jim’s amateur sculptor’s tools, lingering over the brutal flat chisels, before she came to herself, a little ashamed at how she was deliberately toeing the line of hysteria, when she knew very well she could just take what she had seen to bed with her and hope uneasy sleep would eventually claim it.
She went to the kitchen meaning to get her glass of water and go directly back to bed. But when she turned on the light and saw the head-shaped roast her mother had left defrosting in the sink, Jane dropped her glass and screamed and screamed and screamed. Her mother swept into the kitchen, grabbing a dishtowel and throwing it over the meat in one fluid motion, then gathering Jane in her arms while she said firmly to Millicent, “Get rid of it!” Jane kept screaming while Millicent took up the roast and rushed it outside. The floodlights came on in the backyard as she ran out, so Jane could see her clearly through the window as she rushed up to the fence to shotput the meat onto the neighbor’s patio. Millicent ran back with her hands over her ears, like she was anticipating an explosion. By the time she returned to the kitchen, Jane had transitioned to sobs.
“How thoughtless of me, to leave something like that for you to find in the sink,” her mother said, but Jane didn’t want to talk about it. She let her mother guide her around the broken shards on the floor and accepted a new glass of water. In her room, she lay down and closed her eyes. She waited, but of course she couldn’t sleep, with Jim’s vitrification on a looping display behind her eyes, and with that line from the video narration running around and around in her mind as if drawn behind a plane on a banner: Next, the cephalon was separated with an osteotome and mallet. Whatever it was they put in him, whatever it was that flushed his cheeks with cold, whatever it was that turned his face to glass, it made him look very much alive and in a state of perfectly horrible agitation.
Brian picked up his phone right away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t think . . . I assumed this would go to voice mail.”
“It’s my cell number, Dr. Cotton,” he said sleepily. “And I’ll answer anytime you call.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. It made her even more angry that he had answered. “I was only calling to tell you that I’m going to sue you. It only seemed fair to warn you.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “That’s all right. Good for you, Dr. Cotton.”
“You know? What do you mean you know?”
“It’s all right, Dr. Cotton. We understand why you might want to sue. It’s perfectly understandable.”
“I don’t want your understanding. In fact, I want you to stop using that word. I want you to give me back my husband’s head.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cotton. I know you want us to do that, but you must know by now that we can’t. And I celebrate that you want it. I really do. We all do.”
“Don’t tell me what I want! Do you know what I want? I want to destroy you!”
“That’s all right, too,” he said. “If it will help you, you should try.”
“Doesn’t that bother you at all?” she asked. “Doesn’t it bother you at all that you cut off his head with a chisel?”
“This isn’t about me, Dr. Cotton,” he said. “All that matters is that you do whatever you need to so you can come to terms with your husband’s decision and be at peace with it. Polaris has extensive resources, Dr. Cotton.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Wilson?”
“It’s our guarantee, Dr. Cotton. I myself am one of those resources, allotted just to help you, to be there for you for as long as it takes.” When she didn’t reply, he added, with the unclean sympathy of a funeral director, “And you really may find, in the end, that you want to become a member
too. You wouldn’t be the first person to follow their spouse into the future, you know.”
“You’re a monster!” she said, and hung up.
She lay there awhile, panting furiously in the dark, but she didn’t start crying again. And angry as she was now, she felt sure she could sleep, because now she had something to do in the morning. No matter how much time, effort, or money it took, she was going to destroy Polaris. It was the first really comforting thought she’d had since Jim died, and she cuddled up with it, imagining, as she settled her face deeper into her pillow, the glass pyramid falling into broken pieces. She had just drifted off when her phone woke her with a ping, to show her a text message from Brian, We R Here 4 U, and then a little yellow face, not smiling or frowning or grimacing, but serenely absent of expression. Its eyes were closed, as if it were peacefully asleep.
When Jim had stopped crying so hard, he took notice of his hands and feet and the pressure of the sheets against his skin. He could tell by the sharp noise of birdsong and by the quality of the air that a window was open, and he could tell from a soft noise of breathing that he was not alone. He opened his eyes and saw Alice sitting in a wooden chair next to his bed. Now she wore her own pale round freckled face, her features a mix of races he’d never encountered before. She looked like a redheaded Korean, and if he hadn’t been so sad he would have laughed in surprise.
“How could I have forgotten my wife?” he asked her. Alice only stared at him, smiling very slightly. He lay in a very plain bed, in a very plain room, white in the sense of whitewashed, not sterilized or futuristic; a beach-cottage room. Sniffing through his dwindling tears, he caught Alice’s very particular odor, something like asphalt after a rain. “Are you sure you’re not a robot?” he asked her.
“I am not a robot,” she said, smiling broadly now. Then she added, “You are also not a robot, in case you were wondering.” Jim was putting his hands on his face and in his hair as she spoke. Then he gave himself a punishing hug, squeezing hard as if he might make himself pop.
“How could I forget my wife?” he asked again, trying to imply that he wasn’t going to get out of bed, that he wasn’t going to step into the real world of the future, until she helped him with this question. “Why did I do that with you?”
“Incarnation,” she said, as if that explained everything. “You were reinhabiting your connectome.”
“My what?” Jim said. “I forgot all about the most important person in my life. And then I cheated on her!” He scratched at his face, but his nails were filed down well behind the tips of his fingers. “I don’t do that!”
“It was your way forward. It was your practice of Incarnation. No two methods are ever the same, but there are tendencies, and it is necessary that you find your own. Of course you forgot the most important person in your life. That’s precisely who you had to forget, in order to wake, and who you’ll have to forget again—and again and again—in order to stay.” Jim was still kneading his face, asking himself if it was cheating to fuck someone else if you had somehow temporarily forfeited the memory of your wife. Or was it still cheating if you were dead? A widow couldn’t, by definition, cheat. Sex in mourning might be hasty or in bad taste, but it wasn’t a breach of faith. So too might the departed be spotless. Except, he told himself, that he wasn’t actually dead. Now Alice was leaning against the far wall with her arms folded over her chest. She was scowling at him.
“You do understand,” she insisted. “You have discovered the better problem. Someone else might have spent some large part of forever trying to imagine the new world, never even conceiving of a challenge they might master in order to enter it. One reinhabits the connectome by a quantum process. How else would it be? Was it not that way for you, in your other, older life?” After a moment, she added, “Your face is not detachable.”
Jim looked at her from between his fingers. “You’re telling me that I had to forget her to wake up, and then I had to remember her to wake up again? And now you want me to forget her again?”
“Except that, as I say, you were never really asleep. And you will have to forget not only your wife but anyone else to whom you bound yourself in love. You have had to take them back in order to now let them go. You had to remember them on your own, to prepare yourself to truly forget them all. We can’t do that for you.” She sighed, still gently scowling, and crossed the room to take his hands from his face. “It was an early lesson for us, how a client’s memories were both generative and destructive to the New Order of Being. When we gave them back, instead of allowing the client to discover them again, in his own time, in his own way—then there was always an explosion. But also, when we never returned them, when we never allowed the memories to be discovered—there was an even greater explosion.” She made an expansive gesture with their hands, and a grumbling noise in her throat.
“Explosion?” Jim asked.
“Indeed,” Alice said, snapping her fingers. “Instantaneous Quantum Disintegration. Total Connectome Failure.” She paused, as if to give him a chance to consider whether he really wanted to know the gory details.
“Forget Jane? Forget everyone?”
“Exactly.”
“But how could I ever do that? Why would I ever want to?”
“Because you can live,” she said firmly, but she smiled. “And because you must. There’s no room for them here. You cannot be attached to your old life and expect that you can begin your new one.”
When Jim started crying again, she said, “It is good that you are upset. You are upset because you understand. Love and memory are powerfully elastic. If you do not cut the connecting strands, then they will draw you back into oblivion. But you will succeed in this, Jim. You are already on your way!” Now she was crying too—tears of joy, he supposed, but his were still bitter. She stopped talking for a while. She let him cry himself out. He remembered that very well from his old life, that place you came to briefly, when you’d cried all the tears you had. There had only been a couple times when he’d done that as a grown man, a couple worst things in the world that had happened to him, and always when he came before to that cried-out place it had been a very fatigued sort of peace that he had felt there. But now he wasn’t tired at all, and he felt too restless—too curious—to be at peace.
“Did you just say my name?” he asked. “I don’t think you ever said my name before.”
“Well,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I try not to get too attached, before a client Incarnates successfully.”
“That’s probably smart,” he said, and then they were quiet again for a little while. “I’m really here?”
“You are here, Jim.” She stood up, but didn’t offer him her hand. After a pause he lifted his legs and swung them to the floor.
“It’s very hard,” he said, at the feel of the wood, and he grabbed at the varnish with his toes, appreciating very distinctly the squeaking noises he made. “Should I try to stand?” he asked. She nodded. However long he had been whatever he was, asleep or frozen or suspended or dead, it ought to have been harder to stand up. His first steps ought to have been as halting as a newborn fawn’s, but his feet were perfectly confident and his legs were strong.
“Incarnation,” she said when he looked at her, making a gesture at him like she was pointing with her whole body. “It is thus.”
He put his hands out, as if doing that could help him with a mental unbalance. “Forget them?” he asked again. “Forget everyone? Jane and Millicent and Marilynne? Rudy? The cat?” He closed his eyes in a panic, because it seemed like anything he looked at in the room or in the whole new world would cost him some person or place or thing in the old one, but he opened them as soon as she told him to, and when she pulled him to the white-curtained window he went without much resistance.
“Everyone,” she said. “Every last one.” Did she have to be so happy about it? Though he was all cried out for the moment, he could feel his well of tears for Jane already filling up again. He wanted to see her face
again, but at the same time, he wanted to see what was outside the window.
“I can’t remember the name of my cat,” he told Alice. “I don’t even remember what it looked like. Just when it died. That was in the fall of 2011. Kidney failure. But I forget its name.”
“And so we begin,” she said, parting the curtains and putting a hand at the small of his back, as if to keep him from turning away.
“Only an Ahab should ever sue in anger,” Jane’s mother told her while they were getting ready to go out on their first lawyer visit. “Do you have any idea how long these things take? You don’t have that kind of stamina. Nobody does.”
“I’ve got stamina,” Jane said, looking at her reflection as her mother made a bun out of her hair. In the reaches of the mirror, Jane could see Millicent dancing, Jim’s oversize headphones on her head and his old iPod in her hands. Millicent would not stop rummaging in his stuff. That was disturbing at first, but soon enough Jane didn’t mind it so much, and eventually she came almost to enjoy the sight of her demented aunt playing with all of Jim’s orphaned possessions.
Her mother shook her head. “Do you really want to get involved in this sort of thing?”
“I do,” Jane said.
“Hmph,” her mother said. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to be your Starbuck.”
“Or you could just be my mother?” Jane said, and she could tell that hurt her mother’s feelings because Millicent stopped dancing, sat down on the bed, and started to cry. “It’s perfect,” Jane added, touching the bun, remembering Jim’s voice, not so long ago, telling her to be nicer to her mother. “It says, Serious Lawsuit Lady.”
Her mother sat down next to Millicent on the bed and gave her a hug. “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked. “Did you want your hair done up as well?”