The New World: A Novel (7 page)

It was just a cat, after all. And he was only lying in bed, after all. He would tell himself a story in which the cat—the whole cat, the idea and the substance of it, what the cat had been for him and who he had tried to be for the cat—was perfectly represented, or as close as he could manage, and then perfectly eliminated.
Once upon a time,
he told himself,
there was a cat named Feathers. “What a strange name for a cat!” people said, whenever she introduced herself, which hurt
Feather
s
’s
feelings very much.

When he was done, when the cat was strangled, when he could feel the horrible dead weight of it in the exquisitely sensitive hands of his story, he cried himself to sleep, acutely aware that this was a worse pain than anything he had known yet here in the future. But when the bell rang for dinner, he woke refreshed, and he felt a little better, not about the cat (what cat?), but about everything else.

 

“I had a bad feeling about that man,” her mother said, by way of comfort for the dead lawsuit. Jane had gone right upstairs and gotten into bed with her clothes on when she came home from Flanagan’s office. Her mother was standing in her bedroom door.

“Who are these people?” Jane asked. “That they could do something like this?”

“You’re making some very broad assumptions,” her mother said.

“Well, he didn’t just go on vacation, did he?”

Her mother shrugged. “Maybe he’s fleeing his creditors, or the
ABA
. He’s probably in Tahiti with Wanda, if that was even really her name, counting your money on the beach.”

“Mother, he never even charged me anything.”

“New Jersey has been full of derelicts and thieves for decades,” her mother continued. But then she sighed hugely. “Darling, what can I
do
for you?” Jane asked her to bring the computer and a glass of wine.

Jane went back to the Penelope Project.
Listen to me!
she shouted.
They killed my lawyer!
But the conversation scrolled on serenely, so she wrote,
Stop talking about tea! We are all in terrible danger!

In danger of becoming seriously
annoyed
,
wrote Iphigenia7. And Jane got two frowns from Helen22.

What’s wrong with you?
Jane wrote.
I don’t understand!
She got another frown.
I don’t understand you stupid people!
Then the frowns came in a staccato burst, and Jane found herself recoiling from her computer screen, overwhelmed with the notion of three dozen faces (even the lurking ladies were coming out of hiding to frown at her) crowding one another out of the way to show her their expressions of displeasure. And then she actually started to cry, wishing she could tell Jim that the computer had hurt her feelings, or even just tell her mother that all the other hens were pecking at her like a diseased chicken. After a few minutes the laptop began to chime softly at her, as if in apology. When she raised her head up from her arms she saw that she had ended up one frown short of a lifetime ban, and that someone called Hecuba66 had invited her to a private room to talk. She accepted the invitation and typed, with one finger,
Hello?
Hecuba wrote back immediately.

Sorry about them. They’re cowards.

Really?

Of course. I was listening to everything you said,
she wrote.
You’re right,Polaris is a
fucking monster
. Are they appalling you? Are they torturing you? Did they send you the dvd?

They took off my husband’s head with a chisel.

I know! Of course they did.

And now I’m so angry about it I don’t know what to do.

Of course you are! So am I,
seven years later
.

I guess the grief work didn’t help.

The only kind of grief work I want to do is the one where somebody stands on Brian Wilson’s head while I kick him in the face.

Brian! Did he call you too?

He still calls me every year—every year on the
anniversary
. I’m so sorry,
Jane wrote.
That sounds like torture.

It is torture. But don’t be sorry. Sorry’s not going to get any husbands back. Just be angry.

How long did you fight them?

Over Albert? Years and years. I’m still fighting. Even when it all comes to nothing. The lawyer quits, or disappears, or gets disappeared. The letters to the da’s office are never acknowledged, the phone calls never returned. Your Huffington Post article is subject to mysterious edits and redactions, and when you complain they all say the changes were your idea, and they show you the email you never sent asking for the changes. None of that works—the only hope now is direct attack. But I can’t get inside. None of us can. We’ve tried.

Inside? Others?

The rest of us. We’re not all inclined to just sit here and take it. So we’ve tried to get inside. Inside the pyramid. You know, to disable the dewars. Pull the plug. We’ve tried dressing as cleaning women, climbing in through vents, hijacking a drone, but none of it works. Polaris knows our names, our faces,
our
fingerprints.
We’ve blown our own covers. The only people who get in the building are the employees and the members. The shepherds and the sheep.

The members go in? When they’re still alive?

Yes, those poor dumb beasts. The
orientation
ceremony is directly above the
freezers
. Can you imagine anything more disgusting?

Jane remembered a family-systems workshop Jim had attended two years before, in Orlando. It made her head hurt just to think about it.
They invited me to be a member,
she wrote.
Sort of.

There was a long pause. Jane stared at the cursor.

They invited you?

Brian did. Basically.

There was another pause.

We have resources. We have details. We have a plan. All that’s left is a question.

What do you mean?

The question is: Are you angry enough to make this work?

Tell me what you mean? Make what work?

Are you angry enough? Do you
really
hate them? If you want to really get them, then we can help you do it. We can do it together. But you have to be angry enough at what they did to your
husband
. At what they did to your
marriage
. At what they did to
all of us
.
Are you angry enough? Are you raging? Are you furious?

Jane tried out one answer:
No, not really. I mean, probably almost, but when I think about it very calmly I understand that I’ll move on from this one day. Nobody can live a whole life obsessed with one stupid decision her husband made. Nobody can live their whole life in nightmare daydreams of chisels and frozen heads and
 . . . She stopped because the chatroom told her she had run out of characters, but she already knew she wasn’t going to send that.

And I can get Jim’s head back
? Jane wrote, when she cleared the text box.

No,
wrote Hecuba.
But you can keep them from having it either.

Okay,
Jane wrote, so acutely aware that she might just close her computer, and change her phone number, and try to forget the Penelopes, and Brian, and Polaris. Or just stop thinking about them.
Okay,
she wrote again, and she was writing it for the same reason she would have said it, if she and Hecuba66 had been having a face-to-face conversation sitting cross-legged on her bed, whispering together under a blanket—so she could have just one more moment to think, and then one more moment. Except that what she decided was that there wasn’t anything to decide. She wasn’t deciding to do this any more than you decided to bleed when someone stabbed you in the heart.
Okay,
she wrote.
Okay. Tell me how this is going to work.

 

Jim had gotten into the habit of waking up early to work on his book of stories—there would be one for every memory he needed to capture and destroy. Some were very short, only a sentence or two. Others were a couple of paragraphs, and a few were ten pages long. But none of them tried to do anything but represent his feelings for a person, place, or thing that had been part of his own life. When a story was done, he flipped the page and started a new one, and he never looked back. He’d been at work on it for almost three weeks, and had no idea what he’d written, since as soon as he finished a story and turned the page, the thing it was about vanished from his mind and his memory. But though he felt lighter somehow when he looked at the fat wad of pages he’d covered already, he also knew how much work he had yet to do. He hoped it would all fit in one book, since he meant to burn it when he got to the city for his Debut.

At 3:30 in the morning, the house was always dark and still. Jim would creep down to the kitchen for coffee, and then go to his office, a tiny room on the third floor that faced the front of the house. That morning he had just put his head down at his desk to consider a next line, and fallen asleep, then woke at the noise of the front door shutting. Rushing to the window, he saw Franklin depart the house.

Something in the way that his friend held himself as he walked to the bus kept Jim from shouting out congratulations. Franklin, totally naked, walked very carefully across the lawn—it was a surprise for Jim to see him naked, but it made sense that Franklin would cast off all unnecessary accoutrements before he left the house and even that he would
go naked
into the future. That was all of a piece with Franklin’s artistic and dramatic style of mental evolution. Shouting during Franklin’s ceremonial walk would have been like clapping at a funeral, so Jim ran back to his desk and made a sign in big block letters:
Good Luck
,
Friend!
But Franklin didn’t look back once on his way to the bus—it had fat puffy tires and though it rolled all over the lawn, the grass looked untouched where it passed—and once he was inside, the windows were too dark to tell if he was looking back. But Jim tilted the sign from side to side, and opened his mouth as big as a singing Muppet to make soft congratulatory crowd noises, and he kept waving until the bus passed over the roadless hills.

“Something wonderful has happened!” he said to Sondra at breakfast, and showed her the sign he had made. He was intoxicated with happiness for Franklin, though still he ought to have anticipated that Sondra might be sad about it, and so he should have broken the news to her more gently. As soon as she understood, she started to cry.

“I’m just so happy for him,” Sondra said, but Jim could tell that was for the benefit of all the other faces around the table. You weren’t supposed to cry when somebody moved out of the house, you were supposed to applaud or cheer or propose some variety of toast. So Sondra pushed her tears away with the heels of her hands, and rang her glass with a spoon with all the others in salute to Franklin’s achievement.

After breakfast, when she and Jim had gone into the garden to work on their respective projects, Jim sat down next to her where she was kneeling and said, “I’d have to be a very sorry sort of chaplain to believe those were happy tears.”

“But you’re not a chaplain anymore,” Sondra said, not looking up from her rhubarb. “Now you’re a
novelist
. Like Jackie Collins.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Sure you are,” said Sondra, as she stabbed at the rhubarb with her shovel.

Jim moved away a little, and turned his attention again to his book, trying to think about what to write next. A half hour or so passed before he said, “How are you doing over there?” He had been looking over at her intermittently and noticed that she had been still for a while.

She stood up and stretched. “You know, I think it’s time for a nap. How long have we been out here? Six hours?”

“More like one, I think,” Jim said.

“Ugh. I’m going to go lie down. What are
you
going to do?” She winked at him.

“I suppose I’ll probably lie down, too,” he said.

“Well, all righty,” Sondra said. “Then I guess I’ll see you later.”

Jim put his finger on his nose and smiled. He liked her winking, though he had agreed with Franklin that she did it too much—one couldn’t be merrily conspiratorial all the time. But they all had tics and gestures that were the habits of their respective times. Jim was still holding his fist out for bumps that would never come. Brenda stuck out her tongue and goggled her eyes in a Maori fright mask to signal her delight with something. Sondra winked because that was what funny ladies did back when she was learning to be a funny lady. He wondered if she would still wink, after she had her Debut, retaining the habit even after she abandoned her memories of Barbara Streisand and Goldie Hawn. He sighed and got back to his work, struggling for another half hour before he decided he ought to take a break and go minister to Sondra. He had written five new pages and felt a little lighter.

Folly saw him in the upstairs hall and smiled knowingly. His late-morning visits to Sondra’s room were an open secret in the house. They all assumed Jim and Sondra spent their cloistered time together having sex, and Jim got the impression that everyone found their behavior both admirable, since it reflected a definite commitment to the Exalted Here and the Eternal Now, and quaint, since they could have just been fucking in the hot tub with everybody else.

Fully dressed, Sondra was lying on top of her covers when he knocked. She patted a spot next to her. Jim took off his shoes and lay down.

“So where were we?” she asked.

“Anaheim,” he said. “In ’Seventy-six.”

“Oh yes!” she said. “Disneyland on the Bicentennial! Joe was so crabby.”

“But he wasn’t generally crabby, was he?”

“Oh no,” she said. “He got crabby like other people got colds. A few times a year and mostly in winter. And most of the time I always felt like it had nothing to do with me. Or with us. He’d go in and come out of the mood all by himself. And that time, at Disneyland, he got himself out of the mood with a pair of damned mouse ears. He brought them up to the desk to get monogrammed and then put them on his head and walked out of the store without paying for them. When I asked him why he did it he said he was angry that Nixon got pardoned. I said, ‘Joe, that was two years ago, and that was Ford, and you just stole from Walt Disney.’ And he said, ‘Honey, sometimes the Man is the Man.’ What do you think about that?”

“He sounds like a wonderfully complicated person,” Jim said.

“He wasn’t complicated to me,” Sondra said, staring at the ceiling and looking thoughtful. She put an arm across her eyes and sighed. “You know what, darling,” she said. “I’m not sure I can get it up today. Why don’t you talk for a little while.”

“All right,” Jim said, though he was really there for Sondra to talk. It was good for her, to elaborate all these memories, even though to anyone else in the house it would look like he was just indulging her nostalgia, since she wasn’t
doing
anything to contain the memories let alone destroy them, and in fact she told some of her stories over and over. They just burbled out of her, and then disappeared for a while from their conversations, until they came burbling out again. It was surely a first step for her, he thought.

For him, it was like getting to be a chaplain again. That was a habit of his old life, he knew, something he wasn’t supposed to be holding on to. In fact, he had been forgetting his favorite patients all week long, and he knew it wouldn’t be too long before he forgot he had ever been a chaplain at all. But talking with Sondra right now helped him with his own work. It helped him to call up his own memories, to get them ready to go into his book. Often he’d take whatever he’d just told Sondra to his office, and if she asked him the next day to continue the story about (for instance) his grandfather’s candy store, Jim would have no idea what she was talking about. But lately, Sondra was mostly interested in hearing about Jane.

He looked up at the ceiling and folded his hands on his belly. “Jane was always
mistaking
her emotions. You know, like a toddler who thinks he’s angry when he’s actually just terribly sleepy.”

“I never had one of those,” Sondra said. “A toddler, I mean.”

“Me neither,” Jim said. “But you know what I mean. She’d think she was anxious when she was actually angry. Or think she was angry when she ought to have been depressed. With most people it’s the other way around, you know. Show me a depressed person and I’ll show you someone who just needs to go punch somebody in the face.”

“I don’t think they have depressed people anymore, darling,” she said. “Except me. And maybe you. Are you depressed?”

“Just sad,” Jim said. “I think it’s just how the . . . process makes you feel. You know? The emptying out. That can feel like sadness, but it’s not sadness. It’s just . . .”

“Eternal desolation?” she said.

Jim almost grinned. But then he got a better hold on himself, and on his pastoral authority. “Anticipation,” he said. “Isn’t this what they would all want for us? To be happy and free?”

“
They
don’t want anything anymore,” Sondra said. “They’re dead. All that’s left is memories. Maybe it would be easier if we could just
betray
them, but it’s too late for that, right?” She sighed expansively. “Sorry. I think maybe I just need to try something a little different, you know? Like maybe gardening should just be to make the salad. And for remembering and all that other stuff, for getting rid of it . . . something else.”

“Like what?” Jim asked.

“Macramé?” she said. “Lassoing? Who knows?” She stretched and yawned. “Anyway, all this personal-growth talk is exhausting. Let’s just cuddle some, huh?”

“Sure,” said Jim, opening up his arm so she could put her head on his shoulder. She nestled against him like a puppy, but just as Jim drifted off to sleep, she said, “I just keep thinking of Jason. You know, Frank’s partner. Once upon a time Frank lay right here and talked about him. And now Franklin’s gone. And you know what that means?”

No
, Jim said innocently.
What does it mean?
But he wasn’t actually speaking. He tried hard to clamber up out of drowsiness, but when he woke it was late in the afternoon and he was alone in her room.

Sondra wasn’t at tea, or evening calisthenics, which he’d never known her to miss, but Jim didn’t start to wonder where she was until dinner. He sat quietly at the table drinking wine and trying to figure out how to introduce Jane into his book—what scene from their life could he finally start with?—but he was increasingly distracted by Sondra’s absence. At first he was just a little worried about her, but then he started to feel very strongly that she was not just missing but gone to her Debut. He said as much to Folly, who was sitting nearest to him.

“Then I congratulate her,” Folly said stiffly.

Or maybe you’re just jealous
, Jim wanted to say. But instead he said, “Something wonderful has happened.” And Folly said, “Indeed.” So that refrain went around the table. But the Alices looked reserved, and his own Alice said that no one had ever left the house for the city in the evening before, and Sondra’s Alice only shrugged emphatically when Jim’s Alice whispered something to her. When they had all gathered in the great room after dinner, he saw his Alice and Sondra’s Alice slipping away and followed them. “But couldn’t she just have departed without you noticing?” he asked when he caught up with them.

Sondra’s Alice shrugged, and his Alice said it would be very unusual.

Then maybe, he said, she just had a headache. Or maybe she had gone to the city in a unique manner because she was a unique person And then he said maybe she was gardening at night, and that before they knew it she’d be doing something amazing like gardening on the walls or in the air. But he knew before they got to her room that when he had said something wonderful had happened he had just been too afraid to say that he really had meant
something horrible
, and he was already crying before they knocked open her door, and before they found her alone in her bed, and well before he saw how she’d used an old-fashioned straight razor (and what was one of those even doing in the future) to cut her own throat down to the bone.