The New World: A Novel (3 page)

 

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 into 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 Alice 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.”