Chris Adrian - The New World

Wanda’s diary website was down when Jane went to make an entry before bed, and it was still down when she woke up. The mental-anguish receiver was beeping sharply, at three-minute intervals, like a smoke detector asking for new batteries, but it was plugged firmly into the wall. Even the button itself somehow felt less springy.

When Jane arrived at the strip mall, Flanagan’s office was empty, not just of people but of every bit of furniture. She walked outside and stood by the door, making sure of where she was — same dollar store, same threading salon, but now the office was just a blank window. She went inside the salon and asked what happened to Mr. Flanagan. The proprietress raised a hand to her face and blew quickly and harshly across her open palm. “He blew away?” Jane asked, but the lady just shrugged. Jane went back to the office and stood in the empty waiting room, calling every number she had for Mr. Flanagan. None of them were in service. Then she called Brian, who had sent her his customary text that morning: We are all always thinking of you here at Polaris.

“What did you do?” she asked as soon as he picked up. “What did you do ?”

“Dr. Cotton,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“You bastard,” she said. “What did you people do to my lawyer ?”

“We didn’t do anything. Dr. Cotton, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did something happen to Mr. Flanagan?”

She held a pose for moment, one she struck a few times a year at the hospital, holding the phone against her chest with one hand while the other pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to contain herself, but nonetheless she shrieked her reply. “If you didn’t do anything , then how do you know his name? ” Then she threw her phone across the office, and when it wasn’t broken yet, when Brian’s teddy bear voice was still mumbling sympathetically into the appalling emptiness of the rooms, she threw it again, and then one more time, until it shattered.

The morning after his birthday party, Jim showed up early at Alice’s door, ready to learn how to evoke, contain, and forget the memories that were keeping him from starting his new life in the future. He planned on starting small — maybe with Feathers the cat.

“You must free yourself in your own way,” Alice said gently, when Jim made it clear to her that he thought they were supposed to have a lesson that morning. “They are your memories. It was your life. It will be your new life that begins when you are ready. So it must be your work — your art — that holds and abolishes the memories in your way.”

“But I don’t understand,” Jim said.

“Yes, you do,” she said, and closed her door — gently but firmly — in his face. When he knocked again she didn’t open it, but called out that he might go see how the other clients did their work, instead of asking her questions she couldn’t answer for him.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Jim asked, and Alice answered through the door that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He found each of his housemates hard at work in one way or another, and all of them were polite if not quite helpful to him. It wasn’t long before he started to feel like he had going up and down in the hospital when he visited patients as a chaplain, a not-quite-welcome visitor who asked quiet questions about people’s processes. There’s one , he thought to himself, considering the memory, the hospital smell and the noise of his shoes on the linoleum, and the way the sanitizing hand gel felt when he squirted his hands before he knocked on a door. But he didn’t do anything with that memory but put it aside, which was not at all the same as forgetting it.

He went to see Brenda in her pottery studio (where, she told him, she was throwing vessels that would not just contain but be the memories of her old life — she fired and glazed the vessels with great care, only to smash them against the wall as soon as they had cooled) and Blanket in her salon de danse, where she said she was choreographing her lived experience of the old world (her memories were contained in still poses and then destroyed in violent leaps and rolls and kicks). Jim visited Eagle among a mess of little wooden Jenga pieces, which she painstakingly assembled into tall arches held together by gravity alone and meant to perfectly represent one episode from her old life; when the arch collapsed, the memory troubled her no more. Folly appeared to be training plump black ants to battle one another to the death inside a neatly raked Zen sandpit (she wouldn’t speak to Jim, but by her gestures she made it clear enough that they somehow were managing to cancel her memories out), and Ahh! with whom he spent barely any time, appeared to be very intently masturbating, her led hair changing color in a panting cadence in her shadowed room. She took absolutely no notice of him, but he imagined she might be pursuing a perfectly representative and destructive orgasm.

“I like that one,” Jim said to Franklin, the next to last person he visited. “Because it seems respectful to them, you know. To the people and the memories. Like, that extraordinary attention is a way of acknowledging how much they’re worth to you. I can’t believe I’m saying this.”

“But I know just what you mean. And I understand. You have to be good to them, somehow. You have to be trying really hard to represent them. Because they’re worth it, of course. But also, if you didn’t try hard enough, there might be something… left over. Which can be very bad for you.”

“An explosion, right? Alice said something about that.” Franklin nodded without looking up from his drawing. He had Jim working on a drawing of his own. “You’re the best at teaching this, you know. By far.”

“Only because I had a hard time with it too, in the beginning. Who wouldn’t?” He had given Jim a large pad of newsprint and a piece of charcoal, then showed him how to draw a circle from the shoulder, and said he should draw a thousand of them before lunch. “I came to drawing by watching another client breaking horses,” Franklin said. “Noticing how those muscles contain the uncontainable. And what I saw her doing with them was just… a recognition, you know? She was going after a feeling — what a wild life she must have had, to need those beasts to represent it! She was putting her feelings about her old life into those horses, and breaking her feelings. You break enough feelings and you’re new again. Right?”

“But then you have to live without feelings?”

“Don’t be silly,” Franklin said. “Then you’ve got room for new feelings. About new things. In a new life. Then you’re ready for your Debut.” He stepped back from his drawing, a young girl with dark eyes and long hair parted in the middle. “Anyway. You picked a good time to visit my studio. This one’s almost done.”

“She’s lovely,” Jim said. “Very lifelike. Did you draw in your other life?”

Franklin shrugged. “I don’t remember,” he said, winking. “Not anymore .” He took the drawing up in his hands. “It’s my cousin Sylvia. I mean it’s her, and it’s how I feel about her. She wasn’t actually so special. Some people save the hardest goodbyes for last, but I’m just dealing with outliers at this point. Ready?”

“Sure,” Jim said. He put down his charcoal.

“So, like I said: Step one, illustration and integration.” He waved the picture. “Step two, consideration, recognition.” He gave it a long hard look. Then he shouted, “Step three!” and tore the lovely picture in half again and again. When the pieces were too small to rip all together he worried them individually with his teeth, and growled over them. By the time he was done, the pieces were everywhere on the floor and Jim was backed up against a wall. “You know,” Franklin said, when he’d caught his breath, “I think I’m about ready for my masterpiece.” He was smiling and his lips were as black as a dog’s.