The New World: A Novel Read online

  Jane stood for the hymns during the service but did not sing. Her aunt Millicent, who had arrived as always in tow with her mother, warbled prettily beside her, her voice very much like her sister’s, but without the confidence, strength, or control. Millicent had been out of her mind with dementia for almost five years. “As the deer panteth for the water,” she sang, smiling, “so my soul longeth after thee!” When she saw Jane looking at her, she winked, and Jane thought, Exactly—this whole thing is a practical joke. She knew already from her work—because her young patients sometimes died—how the world could seem unreal to the bereaved. That was something Jim used to talk about all the time, how he had spent the afternoon on the moons of Jupiter or in darkest Narnia, when he meant he had been professionally immersed in somebody else’s grief. It was all supposed to seem unreal or impossible, but it wasn’t supposed to be ridiculous.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” Jane had asked Brian, the Polaris customer-service representative, “that you think what you did was legal?”

  “Of course, Dr. Cotton.” He had a quality to his voice that she would describe to her mother as furry, meaning that when she tried to picture what he looked like she could only visualize a teddy bear, its face stuck in a stupid sympathetic half-smile. “Can you imagine that we would offer our service if it wasn’t?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s legal in Florida,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right. That doesn’t mean I won’t have the health department come confiscate every last drop of liquid nitrogen in your filthy buckets.”

  “We call them dewars. And, Dr. Cotton, I just want to tell you that everything you’re feeling is perfectly normal.”

  “Normal?” she said, and then she shouted, “I don’t think you people are allowed to use that word!”

  At the funeral, they sang “Abide with Me” and “When We Were Living” and listened to a succession of eulogies. Jane’s mother had sat up all night writing a sermon on the death of Abigail Adams, in which she expounded upon the gifts of time and silence, but it was Dick and his friends, who sat in a block and wore Viking helmets, who gave most of the speeches, telling stories—each one felt more endless than the last—about Jim at work and at play.

  Jane tried not to listen to any of the eulogies because it felt like all the speakers were conspiring to make her break down. Now she appreciated how fire arrows and a hurly match and Renaissance Fair turkey legs and even the burning boat and burning body would be easier to deal with than this train of perfectly sincere people who wielded their affectionate memories of Jim like heavy cudgels, all aimed directly at her face. And how many times could somebody hit you in the face before you started to cry?

  Millicent was lifting her dress by slow inches and looking slyly around the crowded church. She rarely disrobed completely, but she liked to flash her panties. Jane gently smoothed the dress down over Millicent’s lap, then pulled her aunt’s head to her shoulder. Dick had ascended the pulpit to imagine out loud the wonders of the future into which Jim would wake. He told them all not to be sad, because Jim wasn’t really dead: When you thought about it, he had just undertaken a truly remarkable journey. Dick confessed he’d been just as astonished as anyone that Jim had arranged to take this particular journey, but wasn’t that exactly the gift he had left them all, the very good news that every one of them could follow their dear friend into the future and be with him forever? He said more, but Jane plugged her ears and leaned forward, trying to look funeral-casual, as if she were overwhelmed with sadness rather than anger and disgust. She did not stand up and shout, That’s not how it was supposed to be! She and Jim were going to be together forever in oblivion, and now this fool was inviting the whole church to an imaginary afterlife that Jane wouldn’t have any part in.

  “It’s a mistake,” she had told Brian. “You have to understand. He wouldn’t have believed in what you do. I know he wouldn’t. He didn’t believe in anything but right now.”

  “I know it must be a shock,” Brian said. “And I’m very sorry. But it happens very commonly. I can tell you you’re not the first spouse that’s been surprised like this.”

  “It’s not what he believed,” Jane said, as if Brian simply hadn’t heard her. “And what you’re talking about isn’t even possible. So, please, just tell me what I have to do to get his head back from you.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Cotton,” he’d said. “What you’re asking for—that’s not possible. The way we understand the situation, that would be like killing him. Do you see what I mean?”

  She did not see. Or rather, all she could see when she tried was Jim’s head frozen in a block of water, an enormous novelty ice cube. Or she saw his head being lowered by the hair into a bubbling and spitting pool of liquid nitrogen, then accidentally dropped on a marble floor, his features scattering every which way in shards. Or she saw his pale bloodless face suspended in a tall jar of blue barbershop disinfectant, eyes lifeless but not blank, still full of horror at how he had fallen for a bait and switch. She demanded proof that they had actually done what they had been contracted to do, that they hadn’t just wrapped his head in toilet paper and tossed it out in the hospital trash.

  “Of course,” Brian said. “We maintain full video documentation of the vitrification process.” And while Polaris wasn’t required by any law to show that to her, they certainly would, if she wanted them to. Did she want them to?

  He waited very patiently while she failed to answer, not hanging up or even asking if she was still there. And when her silence transitioned to quiet sobs, he waited even a little longer before he said, “I really am sorry, Dr. Cotton. I’m so sorry for your perceived loss.”

  She wasn’t really a spider. Jim had not actually become a pig. They weren’t really on a farm. It was a sort of staging area. A virtual (anteroom), as the spider revealed to him, shaped by the deeply embedded influences of his native culture and the inclinations of his recovering imagination. The client always started someplace comfortable and familiar.

  Started? he asked. He was fancy-stepping in a circle in his pen.

  Yes. She was busily weaving letters in her web. It is the nature of one (antechamber) to give way to another as your (incarnation) proceeds, as though through rooms, until you exit into the (real) world and go on to conduct your (Examination) and make your (Debut). Sometimes there are many rooms, sometimes there are just a few. Jim pondered this while she finished her message: delicious pig.

  I don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to say.

  The spider shrugged her tiny gray shoulders.

  Why (real), he asked, and not just real?

  Now she frowned. As before, there is a distance between what I understand by that word and what you understand by it.

  I’m not even sure what I understand.

  It’s not predominantly a matter of understanding. Would you like to move on to the next (anteroom)?

  Oh yes. Definitely. I don’t want to spend the future as a pig.

  Then take us there.

  How do I do that? he asked. Let’s start with the short answer.

  You have already done it once.

  But I’m not even sure of what I did, exactly. He paused, waiting for her to help him out somehow. What did it look like to you? he asked.

  Well, she said, it appeared to be a deployment of the right kind of curiosity and imagination. A forceful but effortless kind, if you know what I mean.

  I don’t! he said, and then added, Not (curiosity)? Not (imagination)?

  By these words, I mean what you mean and I understand what you understand. And she had woven a new message without him noticing: you can do it.

  He set his adorable hooves firmly in the dirt, lowered his snout, and squinted.

  Should I close my eyes?

  I don’t know.

  He didn’t ask for any more advice. Instead, he asked himself if he should try to make those two words—curiosity and imagination—into one word and speak them, or combine the ideas behind the words i
nto a new word and (speak) that, or just strain wordlessly against the earth and the sky, demanding that this creation doff its mask and show him what was really there. He tried the last of these, straining and groaning, but nothing happened.

  Try again.

  Jim composed himself, pressing forward to shove his head between the boards of his stall. Show me! he demanded, and considered, quite vigorously, how almost all of what he knew about himself right now was his commitment to being alive in the real world of the future, and how desperately interested he was in this new world; his curiosity had the force of love or despair. A seed of feeling shuddered in him. He had a quick, unsettling thought of a woman, pale, dark-haired, and small, and put the memory aside, a distraction from the immediate, elusive challenge, but the accompanying spasm of energy powered him forward. In one hand he held his devotion to the future, and his curiosity about it in the other, and then it seemed to him that he needed a third hand, to hold the third thing, which was his desire to live. Then he remembered he had hoofs, not hands, and then he understood that he didn’t really have hoofs—he was holding these ideas with some grasping device of his undying and omnipotent mind.

  By a process that was physical and mental at the same time, he launched this thing he had made at the substance of the world of the farm. (Ah-ha!), he shouted, and suddenly the whole world seemed as fragile as it had been beautiful, everything, from the grass to the leaves to the clouds, as lustrous and vulnerable as richly colored glass. When it all broke apart, Jim seized the pieces and remade them. It was not effortless. Why had the spider said it would be effortless? It was exhausting.

  Is this it? Jim asked. He was lying in a bed fit precisely for Louis XVI, with heavy white sheets pulled up to his chin. He held up his hands, spotted and wrinkled, in front of his face. Is this the real world? he asked.

  No. Now she was human, dressed in a Pan-Am flight suit and space turban. But it is much closer.

  At least I’m not a pig, he said.

  You are not a pig. She was holding a tray of food, liquid dinner boxes labeled with pictures of carrots and peas and pork. Are you hungry?

  What’s your name? he asked.

  Alice is my name, she said.

  Alice, he said hesitantly. Do I know you?

  You knew part of me, once.

  I did?

  Yes. I conducted all Polaris phase-two interviews beginning in January 2007.

  Jim gasped. You’re a robot!

  Not anymore, she said. Are you hungry?

  Alice, Jim said, holding up his hands again. What year is it?

  It is too early for me to answer that question for you.

  But why?

  That question also cannot be answered at the moment.

  Jim sighed and put his face in his hands. Well, what time is it, then? Can you tell what time it is?

  It is time for you to continue the work of (Incarnation), she said, carefully setting the tray down at her feet. Then she stepped closer to the bed, leaned over, and kissed him.

  At first, Jim kept all his further questions to himself, and tried very hard just to concentrate. That wasn’t easy at all, and later it felt like a significant accomplishment that he hadn’t blurted out any of his initial thoughts—Is it all right that I am having sex with my (social worker)? Do you have condoms in the future? Are we making love so you can conceive the body that I must inhabit here in the now?—or that he hadn’t made any of his anxieties visible and palpable. He worried that Alice would turn back into a spider and he would find himself suddenly forcing his tongue into her disgusting mouthparts, or that she would become a pig, or a piece of soft fruit, or an oven or a teakettle. He remembered, as he struggled, that he had had this problem before.

  But though he was sure he kept his imagination quite still, everything changed. His body got younger by the minute—the spots disappeared from his hands and his droopy piebald scrotum became hairy and hale. His chest rose up higher toward his chin and his bottom tightened and strengthened with every thrust. Alice did not age either forward or backward, but her face, every time he lifted his head to look at her, was different under the pristine white turban, and then the turban was gone. She was bald, and then she had luxurious soft blond hair, then Nefertiti’s Afro. She was white and black, yellow and green, purple and blue, and often alien though only ever in a sexy original-series Star Trek way; she was never anything but a female, and even though she sometimes had scalloped ridges on her forehead, or extra eyes or vaginas, or gently stinging tentacles in among her pubic hair, she tended, more and more as Jim edged close to orgasm, toward a very ordinary type of human woman, with black wavy hair and brown eyes, a big nose and a small, gentle mouth. Jim knew that he knew this face, though he was trying not to recognize it in exactly the way he was trying not to come.

  The room kept changing as well. The bed was a bed, but then it was a boat, and then an altar, and then a casket lined with puffy satin before it was a bed again. The walls of the room were shining white, and then for a while they might be some new color, unknown to him, but always complementary to Alice’s skin, before they became transparent or just disappeared—Jim was looking at them and then he was looking through them. But he paid closest attention to the action, at what his hands were doing and what his cock was doing—especially that. Sometimes he would slow down just to watch, and somebody would say, “Always together, never apart. Look at my face.”

  Did you say something? Jim asked.

  I did not speak, Alice replied. In this moment, her nose was a beak but her mouth was a plump orange flower. He was aware that fantastic vistas of space lay now beyond the transparent or nonexistent walls, the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, starfields as thick as snowfields, patches of deep darkness subtly colored with blue energy.

  Over the headboard he could see new stars and planets winking into existence at the crest of a propagating wave of creation, and it took only a few thrusts of his pelvis to understand what was driving that wave. This was merely the confirmation of something he’d always suspected or maybe even seen before in some masturbating flight of his imagination, tiny couples fucking at the heart of a clockwork to drive its gears, or arranged in pairs of four, six, or eight to make the cars go, or pushing the flowers from out of their fuses.

  I am fucking the world into existence! he cried.

  Not exactly true, Alice said, though not in a way that at all embarrassed him or dulled his ardor. And not exactly false, either. But now is not the time to be explaining minor distinctions.

  (Fuck)! Jim cried, and certainly it felt like a generative word. It felt like he was using it correctly for the first time, like saying Jesus! when you saw Him in a piece of blackened toast, or Oh my God! when a bush in your backyard happened spontaneously to burst into flame.

  (Fuck)! he shouted again, and though he knew the future must be a perfect and perfectly happy place, he could not help but bring a little anguish into the world he was making. He said to himself, Don’t ruin this nice world by being anxious about absolutely nothing. But then he heard the echo of another voice saying again, “Look at my face,” and he understood the anguish was merely the herald of that ordinary face. Anguish drove his hips harder, and he was trying to make those ordinary features disappear, or trying to summon them permanently, or trying to push through the last soft black wall that kept his act of creation from propagating indefinitely, or he was just trying to come, and that last eternal bit of effort reminded him, as always, of how the space between two people was almost unbridgeable, since sometimes—maybe even the best times—you had to work so impossibly hard to close it.

  He came, as he expected, with a big bang, and finally that ordinary face opened its gentle mouth to give a cry that seemed almost all grief, and surely the reason Jim was crying out “Jane! Jane! Jane!” in sadness was because he was dying again (though in reverse, which was not at all the same thing as being born) and someone must sing him back into the world with laments.

  But when A
lice spoke at last it was in tones of quiet joy. “Congratulations,” she said, a few moments or a million years later. “And welcome to the real word. Open your eyes now, and see it.”

  Two days after Jim’s funeral, the mailman delivered a large triangular envelope to their house in Brooklyn. Jane studied the unopened envelope, which bore a Florida postmark and the Polaris logo at its peak, imagining it would contain a grotesque sympathy card, signed by everyone in the grotesque company and probably illustrated with some grotesque cartoon character—a penguin or a polar bear or an Eskimo or, most likely, a severed frozen Eskimo head that said, in a frosty word-balloon, In Eskimo we have 1,000 words for snow but only one word for the future or There was only one pair of footprints in the snow because the future was carrying me the whole time or the future is so sorry for your perceived loss.

  But instead there was just a dvd in a blank sleeve, labeled on its face: d.o.v.—Polaris Member 10.77.89.1. The dvd was clipped to a glossy blue brochure, along with a note on a piece of Brian’s stationery (his official title was Senior Vice President for Family Relations), “I wanted you to have a little more information about us,” it said, in big looping fountain pen letters, “so I’m enclosing our prospectus along with your husband’s Documentation of Vitrification. Just in case you might be thinking of becoming a member.”

  “The nerve of them!” she said to her mother. “Can you believe it? It’s such . . . it’s so . . .” Her mother watched her patiently while Jane tried to find the words to express the particular quality of outrage she was feeling. “It’s so rude,” she said at last, though that wasn’t sufficient at all. Her mother gave her a hug, which Jane tolerated, though she was getting very tired of people hugging her when she was angry —did people think of cobras as huggable in their flaring hoods, or porcupines as huggable in their coats of rigid spines?—as if anybody could be huggable in this habit of furious sadness she had never known existed until she had put it on. Her mother put the unread brochure into the recycling and the dvd in the trash, then made a show of washing her hands before she went back to planning dinner, fussing breezily over the menu before deciding to make chicken tonight and wait till tomorrow for the roast beef.