by Chris Adrian
Alice held his hand the whole way to the city. Except for his book, he brought no luggage. Though the bus had no driver, it seemed to know just where it was going, rolling confidently over the hills on its big moon-buggy tires. Neither he nor Alice said anything for the first hour of the trip. Jim stared out the window at the lovely landscape, pretty streams and tidy woods and stark blue lakes that looked like they belonged high in the mountains somewhere.
“Do you feel ready for your Debut?” Alice asked at last, squeezing his hand.
“I think so,” Jim said. “I feel ready for something. I’m not having stage fright, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t sound too hard, anyway. I just burn the book, right? As a pledge. And then I say I’m ready to become a citizen if everybody will have me. I make my testimony, and cross my fingers that they’ll all say yes.”
“No need to cross your fingers,” she said. “You’ve already done the hard part. I have every expectation that you’ll succeed today. You’ve made this last part just a formality. I’m very proud of you.” She pointed out the bus’s curved window. “Look, we’re nearly there now.”
Jim turned his head and saw a slender metal spire rising from one of those displaced tarns. Mercury-silver, the tower looked almost liquid itself. A door opened in the lake and the bus drove in. Shortly, they came to a brightly lit underground garage.
Alice led him out of the bus to a smooth elevator, which seemed to move in a variety of directions. They stepped into an immaculate hallway, so white it was hard to tell the bright lamps in the wall from the wall itself, but carpeted in neatly clipped green grass. He laughed when she brought him into the greenroom, which was green all over, not just the floor carpeted in grass but the walls and even the furniture upholstered with it as well. “It’s the greenest greenroom I’ve ever seen,” Jim said. “Now what?”
“Now you can rest, and prepare. You won’t see anyone else until you see everyone else. But look, a friend has sent you some flowers.” They were on the table, a giant bouquet of sunflowers and posies and daisies, all of them shivering, vastly more alive than any flower Jim had ever seen before. There was a card stuck in them, from Franklin. Break a leg! it said. Jim smiled, then winced and held his belly where he had a sudden pain.
“Lie down,” Alice said when she saw his face, leading him to the verdant couch. “You’re pale. It’s all right to be nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” he said. “It’s just a little stomachache. I’m fine, really.” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Alice was fixing something to his hair.
“A microphone,” she said. “The hall is very large. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And how is your stomach?”
“I think it was actually my heart,” he said. “But it’s all better now.”
“Excellent,” she said, with a beautiful smile. She stood him up and offered him her arm. “Then James Arthur Cotton, Polaris Member 10.77.89.1, let us proceed to your Debut!”
In no time at all they had passed down a hall, through a door, and up some stairs, into darkness and a noise he recognized as the susurration of an enormous crowd. She took him onto the stage and stood with him behind the curtain. There was a little brazier set up a few feet upstage, and next to that, on a little stand, a large tin of lighter fluid and a box of wooden matches. “I’ll be just over there,” Alice said, handing him his book just when he realized he had forgotten it in the greenroom. “Good luck, my dear, dear client. Remember, I’m proud of you! How do you feel?”
“Good,” Jim said. “I feel good. I feel ready.” Alice gave him a long, hard hug, and then withdrew. The curtain rose. A spotlight picked him out.
Peering into the audience, all Jim could see was the light on him, but he could hear a great variety of bodies, shuffling and breathing. People are very patient in the future, he said to himself as the empty minutes went by without a single catcall. Maybe because they have so much time, he thought, and then he began to speak.
“Thank you for having me today,” he said. “I’m so glad to be here. I mean, I’m so grateful. I really am. It’s been really charitable of you all, to take care of me like you have. I thought I should say that, before I get started.” He stood up straighter and cleared his throat, and held the book behind his hips with both hands. “My name is James Arthur Cotton. I am Polaris Cryonics Member 10.77.89.1. I am here to formally declare my readiness to enter your world, the world of the future, a world I have diligently prepared myself to understand. I have severed every lingering attachment to my old world, the old life, liberating myself to enter a new one.” He held the book up for them all to see, and then he held it tight against his chest.
“By these flames,” he said. “I ask you to let me in.” He put the book in the brazier and gave it a good soaking with the lighter fluid. His hands were shaking, so he got as much on the floor as on the book. Jim giggled nervously. “I make a mess when I pee, too,” he said to his audience. “So I always have to sit down.” Nobody laughed, but of course the toilets in the future caught the urine no matter how freely you peed. These people couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about. “Somebody used to get angry at me,” he added softly. He stood there a moment, until Alice whispered from stage left, “You should light the fire now!”
“Of course!” he said, and he lit a match, but not the fire. “A Viking funeral always was the best kind of funeral,” he said, staring at the little flame. “I think I should just say a few words, if that’s all right?” He was asking the audience, which remained silent, but Alice was shaking her head vigorously. “Funny to preside at a funeral for somebody you don’t know, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t even know what’s in there anymore.” The motion of pointing at the book extinguished the match, so he lit another one. “I forgot everything else, but I still remember what to do at a funeral. You just put your head down and try to bear as humbly as you can your good luck at still being one of the living.”
“It’s time now to light the fire,” Alice said next to him. She had come onstage while he was talking. He blushed. “You can’t stop now,” she said urgently. “In the middle of things.” She lowered her voice. “It’s dangerous. People have exploded that way.”
“I will,” Jim said. “In a minute. Just give me a second to say goodbye. This is what I do.” He stepped forward and began confidently. “My dear friends,” he said. “We are here together to celebrate a life. This man . . .” Alice was gripping his wrist so hard she was hurting him, but he pointed with his free hand at the book. “I mean, this woman.” But of course that was wrong too. So he said, “Always together. Never apart.”
“Listen to me!” Alice said. “I’m your social worker!” She lit a match and stepped toward the brazier.
“You listen to me,” he said. “She was my wife!” He tried to step in front of Alice, but she bumped him, and the brazier and book tumbled to the floor. Alice dropped her match into the puddle of lighter fluid, and the stage caught fire like it had been waiting forever to burn.
Through the flames, Jim could see the pages of the book unfurling and glowing, the covers spread wide. The ashes rose with the smoke, the plumes twisting into the words and stories and faces. There was something so attractive about the smell. He couldn’t help himself; he took a big heaving lungful of the smoke, and it was like sucking all the memories into his lungs. Or maybe they were just unfolding in him, never having been forgotten, only made incredibly small. In any case, he felt very full. And he felt, deep in his burning chest, that he had somehow found a way for both of them to live forever, a way for him to carry her forward with him and forget her at the same time. He opened his mouth to try to explain this good news to Alice as she ushered him away from the flames, but a hideous belch came out of his mouth instead.
“Oh, Jim,” she said. “You are definitely going to explode.” She was weeping now, and didn’t seem angry with him anymore.
“Would you stop saying that?” he
shouted. “I am not going to explode!”
But then he did.
Jim came to visit and stood right here, Jane thought, and paused to marvel, despite herself, at the size of the room. A moment later it occurred to her that Jim was there right now. She wanted to turn to Sally and grab her by the strange, harness-like piece of macramé and turquoise jewelry she was wearing, and shake her, and cry, “It’s a tomb!” But of course it’s a tomb, she thought. All pyramids are tombs. The gigantic room, as big as a warehouse, was sprayed with blue and green light that gathered in long pools separated by columns of deep shadow. The dewars were arranged in neat glinting aisles. It was cool but not cold. Jane had thought she’d be able to see her breath in the air.
“May I give the dewars my blessing?” Sally asked. She’d brought out a set of crystals on a string and was twirling them gently.
“Of course you may,” Poppy said. “Though it’s probably not strictly necessary.” She smiled at Jane. “They’re down here on the bottom for a reason, behind nine layers of fail-safes that anticipate every kind of disaster that’s ever happened on the earth and several that haven’t happened yet but just might one day.”
“Now I’m asking for their blessing,” Sally intoned. She had her eyes closed, and her crystal was whizzing. Bill was standing with his arms outstretched to the dewars, smiling and humming. “They’re alive!” he whispered, loud as a shout. “I can feel them!”
“Of course they’re alive, silly,” said Poppy. “We are all alive.” She closed her eyes, and seemed to have a little moment of her own.
“May I touch one?” Jane asked, trying to approximate a look of wonder like everyone else was wearing. She found it wasn’t hard—dewar-haunted looked a lot like dewar-reverent.
“ ’Fraid not!” said Poppy. “But you can get close enough to touch one.” Her smile was bright blue in the funny submarine light. “Go on. I trust you!”
Jane took a breath, and a step toward the dewars, then took off running, as fast as she could, into the stubby chrome forest. “Hey!” Poppy said. “Hey! That’s not okay!”
You need to get in deep, Hecuba had written. The Kiss needs to circulate, and the closest air intake is at least thirty yards from the door. Did you memorize the schematic?
Yes, Jane had typed. She had pored over it. She had studied it so hard she had dreamed every night since of walking through an endless field of frozen heads, looking for her husband. So there was something familiar about her flight into this forest of silver tree trunks, a feeling that she had already been doing this forever, or that she would be doing this forever.
I just want to see his face, Jane had written. But of course there weren’t any windows on the dewars. And though she had followed the path she marked out on the plans (stolen, Hecuba said when she emailed them, by a lady from Newark, whose husband had died on their honeymoon), she couldn’t know for sure that she was even in Jim’s neighborhood of the graveyard, and it was too dark to be certain of the serial numbers on the dewars. But she stopped in front of the one she thought was right, and put her hand on it.
Poppy’s shouting already sounded very near, but Jane didn’t hurry. She rested her head against the dewar, thinking to herself, Jim would know what to say. All she could think of was “Oh, Jim, what did you do?” That came out in a not-very-elegant croak, and then she had nothing else to say, like any other time in their marriage when it was her turn to chase, and his to withdraw like a pouting child, after a fight. And really that’s all this was, she told herself. If she could just calm down for a moment and establish the right perspective, then she would see that this was just another awful fight, and it had fallen to her, as it did sometimes, to take the risk of reconciling them.
She brought out the Kiss, asking herself if blowing it all over his dewar, a total discharge of her rage in one furious, shrieking breath, would be exactly the first step of that reconciliation. She opened the envelope and took a great preparatory inhalation.
She held the breath, and held it, even while her eyes filled with tears, the dewars shimmering in front of her. She carefully resealed the envelope and put it back in her pocket, and only then did she exhale, the breath long and quiet, with her head resting on Jim’s dewar, and with the very last of it she whispered, “Always together.” When Poppy found her at last, she was slumped quietly against the cool metal surface.
“Holy Future!” Poppy shrieked. “What are you doing!” She pulled Jane back roughly by her arm, then fluttered around the dewar, checking lights and gauges.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Jane said.
“Something horrible,” Poppy said. “That’s for sure. I’m taking you to see Brian right now.”
“Yes,” Jane said. “I’m ready to see him now.” Poppy marched her back to the door, where Sally and Bill were standing nervously. Jane wanted to bleat at them, but suddenly felt too tired for it. It was a tense, silent ride back up to the ground floor. Poppy put Jane in the front seat, where she could keep an eye on her. Sally leaned forward, at one point, to whisper that if Jane had fucked this up for them all she was going to make her very sorry, but Jane was too tired, or just not angry enough anymore, to turn around and tell her to fuck off.
Brian’s office was a wide stretch on the second floor with a view through a stand of poplars to the lake. Poppy left her standing at the glass wall, giving her one last long frown before she went. Brian came in and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it before she let him turn her around. His large soft beard made his whole face seem soft, and his eyes were in fact as black as the buttons on a teddy bear’s face.
“Dr. Cotton,” he said at last, but only after Jane had started to cry. “Welcome. Come sit with me.” He led her to a conference table and pulled out a chair.
“I have nothing to say to you,” she said. Taking the Kiss in its envelope from her pocket, she put it on the table and said, “I only came up here to give you this. It’s some kind of poison or whatever. It will shut down your dewars. Thaw your heads. But it’s over now. I just wanted to see his face. Or something like that.”
“I knew it!” Brian said, pounding the table with one hand and making a kind of wiggly, celebratory motion in the air with the other one. He was just as young as he had sounded—far too young and handsome, she thought, to be caught up in this atrocious business of death, but then she always thought that when she met a young, handsome funeral director or pathologist, one who looked as if he should smell like a sweaty boy instead of formaldehyde and sweet rot. And the beard! It was as soft and curly as she had imagined, identical in texture and length to his hair, so the overall effect, with his plump cheeks and black button eyes, was that he seemed to be peeking at her from behind a bush. He took her hand, catching it again when she pulled away. “I knew you would do it,” he said.
“Do what?” Jane asked.
“Pass the test,” he said, indicating the unopened envelope on the table with his eyes.
“Do you mean to tell me . . .” she began. “Are you saying that Flanagan, and the chat room, and the Kiss . . . ?”
“It was all a Willy Wonka mindfuck!” Poppy shouted joyfully, suddenly behind her.
“Where did you come from?” Jane asked.
“I’ve been here the whole time,” Poppy said, sitting down now and taking Jane’s other hand, so she was captured between them. “Did you get the plans?” she asked gravely, then giggled. “It was me. I’m Hecuba.” When Jane only stared at her, she said. “Hecuba66!”
“I think she understands, Poppy,” Brian said, in his gentle funeral-director voice.
“I don’t,” Jane said, pulling her hands away and standing up.
“We like to be sure of people, Dr. Cotton,” Brian said. “We have to be sure of people. And now we are sure of you.”
“Sure of what?”
“Sure of your love! Your love of your husband. Your love of life. Your love of us. You could have chosen death, but you chose otherwise. You chose life.”
; “You must have me mixed up with my husband,” Jane said, though she thought it would be wonderful to believe all the things he had always said about life and love and being together forever, since maybe they would all remain true even if only one of them believed them. They’d traded off believing in them, after all, hadn’t they? She tried very hard to remember. Always together. But sometimes it was only one of them doing the work to keep them never apart.
“He loved everybody,” she said. “And I love him, but everybody else I pretty much hate.” Still trying to be angry, all she could manage was to be annoyed by the way Brian was staring so hard at her, and by the way he kept saying her name like he was savoring it in his mouth. “What?” she snapped. “What do you want from me now? Should I just go home, or are you going to press some kind of fake industrial espionage charges on me?”
“Dr. Cotton,” he said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that you are home.” He was staring at her with such total sincerity that she could not pull her eyes away to roll them at him and at Poppy, at Jim, at the whole absurd situation, and the ridiculous pyramid and the ridiculous city and the tasteless trash heap of a state. She couldn’t even blink. “Your home is with us because his home is with us. Your home is with your husband. Don’t you understand? You can already be together forever.” A contract had appeared on the table. He laid his hand across it.
“Really?” she said, beginning to cry, now not only for anger or for grief. “You really believe that?” She reached for Brian’s face, and tugged gently on his beard.
“Really,” he said, so full of his good news. “Really!” He was weeping also, and Poppy was hyperventilating, and Jane felt suddenly aware of all the other people in the pyramid, on the balconies and coigns of the upper levels, other boys with soft beards, and girls with protractors in their hair, lovers and dreamers and frightened selfish fools. She put her other hand in Brian’s beard and held on to his face, knowing, in a way that entirely transcended time, that he had grown the beard so she could shake his face just like this. “Brian,” she said, and he just kept smiling and crying. “Oh, Brian.”