Chris Adrian - The New World

Except she might not really be dead. She might be here, challenged like him to forget her old life in order to start a new one. He closed his eyes and leaned against a tree and curled his toes up so he could think about that. They’d started over before. That would be nothing new. They’d started over, for instance, after his accident, though not in the dramatic way Alice was talking about now, what with the total forgetting and the absolute requirement that fate bring them together again, since he and Jane wouldn’t know anymore to look for each other. He could almost believe it might happen — just waking up in the future was already proof of the impossible, after all. But he couldn’t imagine that Jane wouldn’t somehow feel what he’d done, when they met again on the other side of amnesia, or that she could ever forgive him for it.

Always together — he’d promised it too. Never apart. Of course they’d both broken that promise over and over, mostly in imaginary ways, the sort of daydream unfaithfulness and desultory withdrawal that Jim thought were necessary to keeping faith. His Polaris contract had been something like that, a way to withdraw from his wife without actually withdrawing, a potential withdrawal, a theoretical betrayal. Except now, ages later and yet quite suddenly, it was real.

Eventually, Jim caught a glimpse of the house, and then a whiff of dinner, and felt how hungry he was. And maybe because his ears were as special and as new as his feet, he heard the laughter and clink of glasses long before he got back. There was nothing forced about his big relieved grin when he arrived to see all his new peers and their social workers gathered around the farm table for his welcome feast. When Jim walked in, they cheered. “I’m so proud of you,” Alice said, after they had all introduced themselves, and Jim had bowed at each of them. Then, with a bowl of cool water and a warm towel, Alice washed and dried his feet.

When she went back to her place at the table, Jim took the only other open seat.

“Are you like me?” Sondra asked him when he sat down.

“Like what?” Jim asked.

“Lay off him,” said Franklin. “Can’t you see he just lost his training wheels?” He passed Jim a glass of wine.

“Like, old ,” said Sondra. “I bet you’re from 1970. Am I right?”

“Sort of,” Jim said. “In 1970 I was ten years old.”

“Lay off,” Franklin said again, putting an arm around Jim. “Can’t you see he’s a newbie-delirious?”

“I’m all right,” Jim said, draining his glass and holding it out for Sondra to refill. “I like this wine. I’d kind of like to taste it with my toes .”

“Ha!” said Franklin. “Just wait till your tongue really kicks in.”

“Everything is better here in the future,” said Sondra. But she rolled her eyes.

Jim really did like the wine. He really liked the food. He really liked talking to Franklin and Sondra or even just looking at them and all the others, each of them dressed alike but very different-looking, having died at different ages and in different times. I’m not thinking about anything but right now , he said silently, not sure, under the influence of the wine, if he was talking to Jane or to Alice.

“Hey,” he said to his new friends, lowering his voice. “Tell me about the mind surgery.”

“The what?” asked Franklin.

“Mind surgery. My Alice said I was going to have to cut out my own memories. So how do you do that?”

Franklin laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, pouring Jim more wine. “Not on your birthday. You’ll figure it out later. We all did. Tonight, you should eat, drink, and be merry.”

The others followed Sondra when she raised her glass a final time, and they all took up a cheer for Jim. Then each of them walked over and knocked glasses with him while Franklin stood by to refresh their wine, and Sondra just sat, staring at their housemates as they came and went, not saying a thing, but matching Jim sip for sip. By the time the cake came out she was as drunk as he was.

“I’ve been waiting for a special friend to come,” she said to him, hanging hard on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” said Franklin. “She said that to me, too. She says that to everybody.” Sondra flashed Franklin a finger, but Jim didn’t pay attention to their argument. He was watching his Alice as she rolled a cake, nine tiers tall, toward the table.

“Happy birthday!” the Alices said, and the others all said it too. Sondra shouted and sobbed in his ear until Franklin drew her away. Alice pulled Jim up to the cake. “Don’t forget to make a wish,” she said. The others began to murmur and then sing again, “Welcome, welcome,” and even in the humid air, warmed by their collective breath, he could feel the heat of the cake’s single candle as a discrete warmth on his face. Jim closed his eyes and made his wish, which was a question directed not at God, who had never really existed for him, but at everyone he had ever loved when he was alive: at his childhood friends and the teachers who had changed his life; his parents and his aunts and uncles; his adult friends and colleagues; the patients he had loved as a doctor and the patients he had loved as a chaplain; and the friends he had never physically met but with whom he felt close in spirit, Bugs Bunny and Batman and Valentine Michael Smith and Billy Pilgrim and Harry Potter, Pope John XXIII and Maya Angelou and Michelle Obama. And then there was Jane, who was, after all, the only person he really needed to ask: Please, can I stay here and live?

After they’d eaten the cake, everyone moved outside to continue the party on the patio. Jim didn’t join in when others removed their clothes and slipped into the hot tub. He didn’t protest when Sondra sat on the edge of his chaise, or when she took his foot in her lap and began to massage his heel. “I like a nice handsome foot,” she said.

“My toes are very sensitive,” Jim said.

“And I like a nice hairy foot. Joe had feet like a hobbit.”

“Who’s Joe?”

“Nobody,” she said, squeezing too hard. Jim winced.

“Gently,” said Jim’s Alice, coming up behind the head of Jim’s chair and laying a hand upon his shoulder. “Those toes are brand-new sensory organs.”

“Sorry,” Sondra said, throwing his foot down. She walked away, shedding her clothes on the way to the hot tub, stepping in just as Ahh! was standing up in the water to show everyone her ambiguous genitalia, wet enough now to start swelling up like one of those compacted foam dinosaurs you might put into a child’s bath. Jim turned his gaze away to Alice, who was staring at him, as friendly and serene as a sloth. “I think it’s past my bedtime,” he said to her, and she took him up to his room and tucked him in.

“Welcome, welcome,” she said again, kissing Jim’s forehead. She paused at the door, which made him feel like a child.

“Such a long day,” he said to her before she turned out the light and closed the door, though what he really wanted was to ask if they might not say a prayer together before he went to sleep, a prayer for the dead. Then it felt to him as if he spent the next few hours totally still in his body but restless in his spirit and his mind, trying to find the words for that prayer. How stupid, he thought, that no one ever pitied the dead for their grief, the religionists too busy making the hugely broad assumption that the dead were too distracted by bliss to miss the living, and the atheists thinking oblivion would be enough to comfort anybody who sustained that kind of loss. Now I am too sad to sleep , he told himself, wishing that he hadn’t retired from the fellowship of the party and the comfort of the wine, and he wished Alice had stayed with him, sitting by his bed and singing him to sleep. But then, as if it had sensed his mood and jumped into the bed to comfort him, the name was suddenly there with him. Feathers , he said to himself, just before he fell asleep. What a weird name for a cat .