The New World: A Novel (10 page)

 

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.”

“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 (
a
rrive)!
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.”