The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  “Dr. Cotton!” he cried out joyfully. “Jane!”

  “Oh, Brian.” She sighed again. “Poor Brian. You don’t understand—none of you do. Don’t any of you get it? Don’t any of you understand what forever actually is?” Then she cast his face away—who knows where she found the strength? Jane cast Brian Wilson at her feet, and Poppy stood frozen when she walked out of the office. She got in the little clown car from the future and started to drive, not sure where she was going, and not sure if she would even be allowed to escape the Polaris campus, let alone this pathetic and ridiculous situation of her life, if they would capture her and forcibly transport her to the future, or have her arrested for her own part in their conspiracy to break her heart. But she didn’t care. Really, she didn’t. Wherever she was going, whatever was going to happen, this moment alone was enough to hold and sustain her. Does this thing have a radio? she tried to ask of the air, because she wanted to make herself laugh, as the great glass doors opened after all and she drove out into the flat Florida glare. But she only said, to the full absence of him, “Jim, I’m coming,” and made herself cry harder instead.

  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 was 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 to ask. 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 stale and remote way, a great panic at dying, and asking someone—not God, of course—for just a few more minutes, a few more words. He remembered how he had understood in his very body that he wasn’t going to get them. Or was the panic about something else? He complained: My heart hurts.

  Yes. I’m sorry about the (pain). He tried to decide whether he had only 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.

  (Pain)? he asked. And then, after something like intuition, something like memory, (Pain.) (Book.) (Funeral.) (Alive.) And after that: (Alive!) (Book!) (Funeral!) Then: (Book) (Book) (Funeral) (Funeral) (Alive) (Alive) [Book Funeral Alive] (Alive) (Alive) (Funeral) (Funeral) (Book) (Book). And finally: Alice!

  Yes, Jim, she said. Welcome to Cycle Two.

  Cycle what? Jane! Oh God!

  Cycle Two. It comes after Cycle One.

  But I failed. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t forget her. How could I do it?

  Yet you tried. You tried very well.

  I did?

  Assuredly.

  But that’s horrible!

  No, it’s wonderful. I was, and am, so proud of you.

  Incarnation, Examination, Debut—was that all a lie, then?

  Not at all. But each is both a local and a universal process. Do you understand?

  He did, right away, wishing he didn’t. You do it over and over?

  Yes. Until you (arrive)! Are you ready? Would you like the long answer to the question of how we proceed from here? I believe you are ready for the long answers now. When he didn’t respond, she asked again, Are you ready?

  No.

  Very well. We will rest awhile. We could rest for an age, if you wish. There is time.

  I mean, Jim asserted, I’ll never be ready.

  But you already are ready.

  No. I don’t want to be ready. Alice, I don’t want to. When she didn’t reply, he added, a little desperately, Don’t you understand? I want my life back.

  You mean you want to be alive! she corrected. You cannot have your life back. That is exactly why it must be forgotten. Do you appreciate how much you have learned? You are already so much more like us!

  But I want my life.

  You cannot have it. But you can be (alive)!

  Life, Jim repeated, not sure whether he felt like a child or like he was reasoning with a child.

  Alive! Polaris Client 10.77.89.1, this is what you wanted! This is what you chose. And then, more gently, she added, You will be in love again. Do you think no one is in love in the future?

  Who cares about love? Jim replied. That’s the easy part. It’s only the first part. We were in life together, Alice. We were in life! And if we aren’t together now, then we weren’t together then? Do you understand?

  She didn’t understand. Then they started to fight, at first only with notions and assertions and words, until Jim added thrusts of (imagination) to his arguments, so for a few timeless moments he was a pig trying to crush a spider under his little hooves, or an old man hitting his nurse with a pillow. Then Jim was asserting his hips against her hips, or blowing out a match every time she struck one alight. And then for a while she was showing him images of surpassing loveliness, portraits from the future calibrated just to the edge of his ability to recognize them as more beautiful than alien, which Jim answered, again and again, with an image of the dull white bone at the bottom of the wound in Sondra’s throat. But eventually all Jim was asserting to her was: (Life) (Love) (Memory). And all she was saying in reply was: (Alive) (Love) (Alive). And at last he overpowered her, or she relented. She put them on a flat green field under a cloudless sky. A hot-air balloon was tethered directly behind her.

  “Are you really sure?” she asked weakly.

  “Yes,” Jim said. “Just let me die. Turn it off, whatever it is. I’m ready.”

  “But I don’t understand,” she said very sadly. “We do not understand.”

  “There’s another way to be alive,” he said. “To have been alive. I barely understand it myself. I don’t have time to explain!”

  “Then goodbye, Jim Cotton,” she said, stepping out of his way. When he had clambered into the basket and turned around, she was part of a crowd of bodies, but her face was the only one that he could see clearly.

  “Hurry!” Jim said as she fiddled with the lines. “Hurry up, before I forget!” No one helped Alice with the lines, but they were all waving handkerchiefs and cheering softly at him. “Goodbye!” he said, when he finally began to rise. “Goodbye, everybody!” Then his backward-drifting balloon had entered a cloud, or a wall of snow, or maybe all the handkerchiefs had taken flight to escort him to wherever it was he was going.

  “Jane,” he said, just before he was nowhere and nothing at all. “Here I come.”

  Jane lay in bed for an hour, not exactly waiting out the dark, though lately she preferred to rise in the light. She’d been getting up in darkness for most of her life, and had never been troubled by a dead stillness in a house, or the quivering gray static she saw when she stared long enough at absolutely nothing in a dark room, but now those things made her feel almost more lonely than she could stand. Her mother, whenever she sensed her awake and abed, encouraged Jane to sit outside on the terrace, so she might witness the remarkable transformations of the dawn and let some light into her soul. She never asked Jane if she and Millicent should go back home to Northampton, and Jane never told them to leave. But it was another advantage of waiting for the sun to come up before she got out of bed, that her mother would take Millicent for her long early-morning walk, leaving Jane to herself. They were always gone at least an hour, unless the weather was very bad, since Millicent had to examine every little thing as they went along, lingering with her eyes over flowers, light posts, and garbage cans the way a dog might linger with its nose.

  Jane took her time making her morning tea, staring awhile at her mother’s extensive traveling collection
before finally selecting a tiny can of matcha. She had no plans to become one of those ladies with bitter tea breath who sit around the house in an oversize cardigan with a giant mug in her hands, setting her face in thoughtful poses over the steam, someone who seems to turn tea into a companion. Even if she was wearing one of Jim’s cardigans, and permitted herself to look very thoughtful or sad standing by the kitchen window waiting for the water to boil, she knew this was an indulgence as temporary as her withdrawal from work, or her mother’s tenure in her house. She wasn’t going to become a tea lady. But for twenty minutes or so, it was nice to pretend she could actually enjoy a little shallow contemplative wonder.

  She took the water off the flame just before the boil could really start to roll, having already measured two precise scoops of bright green powder into a cup with the long-handled wooden spoon that her mother sometimes wore in her hair. She poured the water (and lingered, yes, over the steam), then attacked it with the bamboo whisk, deliberately restraining herself from picturing a particular bearded face held still in a vise so she could attack it with vigorous zigzag scratches.

  She drank the second cup down like a shot of liquor, then got back to work. Alice was there immediately when Jane clicked her icon (this made Jane think she must be running always in the background of the computer’s OS, watching and listening to everything Jane did, and so she started borrowing her mother’s laptop to talk with Hecuba). Alice’s eyes darted more slowly this morning, as if she were watching a very sluggish game of Pong.

  “Good morning, Dr. Cotton. It’s seven thirty-five a.m. on April 7, 2013. Shall we continue your application?”

  “Where do you go when I shut the computer?” Jane asked.

  “I don’t understand your question,” Alice said. “Shall we ask for help?” She summoned up a Polaris chat box, but Jane dismissed it.

  “No,” Jane said. “Would you like some tea?”

  “I would not like some tea,” Alice said. “Shall we continue your application?”

  “By all means,” Jane said.

  “Very well,” Alice said. “Please tell me the story of the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Please tell me—” Alice began, but Jane cut her off.

  “Why would I tell you something like that?” Jane asked, raising her voice and taking great pains to enunciate. “Why do you need to know that?”

  Alice paused, though her eyes kept moving. “I understand your question,” she said. “May I refer you to FAQ 217.7 in the Polaris Applicant’s Handbook?”

  “May you?” Jane asked wearily. “You may.” The box appeared next to Alice’s chin:

  Q: Are you trying to make me feel ashamed?

  A: Of course not. In the future, there won’t be any shame. We ask these questions not because we are looking for people who have never done anything wrong, but because what you tell us will help us know you better. And we want to get to know you very well indeed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Jane. She considered various easy anecdotes—a neglected goldfish, a cruel playground taunt—but suspected Alice would blink away those stand-ins. Polaris already had her husband. They’d already taken away the meaning of her marriage; now—of course!—they wanted everything that was left of it, the secrets and memories that were its substance. I’ll give it to you, all right, she thought. Just wait.

  “Shall we begin?” Alice asked, after thirty seconds of silence, and then after thirty more she asked again. “Wait!” Jane said. “I’m thinking!” Then Alice waited two minutes before she asked again, but still that could hardly be time enough to consider an answer, unless you were one of those people who walked around barely able to restrain yourself from telling people how terrible you were, or one of those people who had done so few terrible things in her life she could pick the worst one in a snap. But finally she responded, “Sure. Yes.”

  “Voice input or keyboard?” said Alice, but Jane had already started typing.

  She hadn’t particularly meant to cheat on Jim, but neither was it something that just happened. Part of finally figuring out how they were going to make it together was them both committing to tell the other if one of them felt suddenly compelled to try to destroy the marriage. This was almost never a confession of desire for some (essentially random) other person, but a confession of the perverse desire to be fundamentally alone, to withdraw from their shared life, with all its benefits and obligations, to an easier loneliness they each sometimes preferred but neither really wanted.

  There was nothing wrong with this. It was, in Jim’s annoying chaplain parlance, allowed. You might even, as they both sometimes did, announce that you were thinking of taking a vacation, and (after some back and forth on the nature and duration of the trip) be wished a bon voyage, and then retreat for a few days, or maybe even a week, into a kind of sullen impersonal detachment. That was fine. You just had to let the other person know what you were doing. But this time she didn’t tell Jim what she was doing. She barely even let herself know. And so the promise she broke was much bigger than a mere contract of sexual fidelity. And that, Alice, was the worst thing she had ever done.

  But Alice didn’t need the details. She couldn’t possibly comprehend them. Polaris couldn’t possibly comprehend them. In fact, Polaris was the very antithesis of those details, which only convinced Jane more and more that Polaris was hiding something from her, that they had tricked Jim into signing up, or that he had signed up with them long before he and Jane had ever met—because he was always better at holding up his side of the bargain than she was at holding up hers. This kind of total withdrawal was something that he simply wouldn’t ever do to her.

  So she didn’t even mention the promise, or the baby funerals. Instead she wrote, His name was Ben.

  They met in the or, over a frozen section. Or they might have one day said that was how they met, if she had run away with Ben into a different life, into some kind of temporary happiness that would (she did not doubt) congeal into a permanent and familiar unhappiness, an unhappiness that would look just like the one that had motivated her to cheat in the first place, except it would be worse. Because now she would no longer have Jim to help her manage it. Or because now she wouldn’t get to enjoy any longer the sovereign remedy of helping Jim with his own constitutive and situational unhappiness, which sometimes was the only remedy that ever really helped with hers. So running away with Ben was never really an option, though she wrote to Alice as if she had actually been tempted to do it.

  It was his eyes, she wrote, though of course it wasn’t really his eyes that attracted her. Maureen had actually flirted with him first, but they both had or crushes on him, and when she came to Jane’s office to prove her point about what color Ben’s eyes were by Googling cornflower blue, Jane saved the image on her desktop and let it sit there, one little square among a hundred others. She moved the image around, a marker denoting exactly how important Ben was in the daily sum of her thoughts and feelings—she supposed it reinforced her feelings of control over things, and helped delude her into thinking that there wasn’t anything to tell Jim yet. But by the time she and Ben were fucking in his office twice a day she’d made the cornflower her wallpaper, and though she sat in front of it for half of every afternoon she barely saw it anymore.

  It was Jim and his pathetic baby funerals, she wrote, adding (but only in her head), he cheated on me first with those grieving almost-mothers. Of course it wasn’t really that, either, but that was what she and Jim talked about, once it was already too late to talk about it. She had sex with Ben for the first time the day after the evening that Jim came home and told her, in excruciating detail, about the service he had performed for a stillborn baby on the tenth floor of the children’s hospital. He said it was like his pain came out of him to mingle with the pain of the almost-parents. Except that he told them, of course, that they were parents. “And when I pronounced them parents,” he said of the dead-baby baptism he’d been waiting three years to p
erform, “for just a second I thought the baby was going to start crying.”

  “That’s really great,” Jane said, and she cried with him, though she wasn’t crying for the reason he thought she was crying.

  She never met with Ben outside of the hospital—in the six weeks it lasted, the relationship never progressed that far. But the hospital covered twenty square blocks of Washington Heights, so there were all sorts of places to go and even people to see, if you counted security guards and volunteers and patients as people, since they avoided nurses and other physicians and especially the gossipy chaplains. There were lovers’ vistas to enjoy, gorgeous views of the river or the downtown skyline from empty rooms, and twice they even had a sit-down dinner, with real napkins, at the strange little restaurant on the eighth floor, attached to the vip unit, which had once been patient rooms. “It’s like the French Laundry,” Ben said, “but with patient smell.”

  “The French Stroke Unit,” Jane said. She wanted to spend the night with him, but they never did that, even though Ben spent the night in his office all the time. He practically lived there—Jane hadn’t ever known a pathologist who worked so hard. If he’d had a bed in his office, she might have dared. She spent the night in call rooms all the time, after a long case, or even when she had a little patient whose post-op management she didn’t totally trust to the icu. Jim wouldn’t have thought twice about that kind of absence from her. But the nearest she came were the postcoital naps, on a couch that didn’t really leave any room to cuddle, so she had to sprawl on top of Ben like a dog. That’s when she came closest to asking for what she really wanted, an intimacy more obscene than any sexual experience they pursued. She meant to burst into tears on top of him in the middle of the radically uncomfortable cuddle, so that, without even finding out what was wrong, he could tell her he was sorry, that he loved her, and that everything was always going to be okay in the end.