Chris Adrian - The New World

“What’s that?” Jim asked. “Who’s it going to be?”

“Oh, just some dude,” Franklin said. “Now it’s your turn.” He stood over Jim’s shoulder while Jim finished the cat, and he really was a good teacher, asking Jim all the right questions to help him remember how the cat looked, and to put names to the feelings the cat evoked. Jim managed to draw something much prettier and lifelike (and therefore more representative and cleansing, Franklin said) than the stick figure he would have done on his own. There you are , Jim said to it. You were a good cat. We had some good times together, I’m sure. But now I’m going someplace where pets are not allowed.

“Now hold the name in your mind,” Franklin said, “and tear that fucker to shreds.” Jim did as he was told. He sang the name in his head— Feathers! — and tore the picture to shreds. “There you go,” Franklin said. “Now isn’t that better?”

“Maybe,” Jim said. “But I still remember the cat — even better than before, actually. Now I can see it.”

“Well, sure,” Franklin replied, a little crossly. “You still need to find your own way. That’s why I’m not a horse trainer. Only you can truly free yourself from the bondage of the past.”

“Yeah, that Frank is intense!” Sondra said. Jim went to see her when he was done with Franklin. Her studio was actually the whole garden. She gave him a hand-weeder. “But it’s hard, obviously. Figuring out your new job. I’m a lot more mellow than Frank, you can probably tell.”

A lot more sad, anyway , Jim wanted to say. That was the sort of bold conversational risk he used to take routinely as a chaplain, but it didn’t seem appropriate here — he was supposed to be learning from these people, not trying to counsel them. Still, in a professional way, his heart went out to her. “Too bad they don’t need any humanist atheist chaplains in the future,” he said. “I know how to do that .” She took him to a row of carrots, where they knelt together and began to weed.

“Or hairdressers,” she said.

“Oh, is that what you did?”

“We owned a few salons,” she said. “Well, scads and scads of salons, actually. You don’t buy a ticket to the future with tips!”

“I suppose we shouldn’t be talking about this,” Jim said. “Our old jobs in our old lives. You should tell me about the work you’re doing right here and now.”

“Sure,” Sondra said. “But fuck it. Why don’t you meet me later in my room? I’ll make you look like Sandy Duncan and you can pray for my soul.”

“I don’t believe in souls,” Jim said.

“Ha! Then you can pray for my connectome .”

“You can style my connectome,” said Jim. Sondra slapped her thigh with her little shovel and laughed. When he’d gotten every weed within reach, he started to make the soil neat and flat around the tender little carrot tops. “So tell me about your method.”

“Well,” she said. “It’s simple, really. Which is what makes it so beautiful. I treat each plant like a memory. Or I treat each memory like a plant. Anyhow, I bury them in the earth. End of story.”

“I see,” Jim said. “And what about the feelings that go with the memories?” They moved down the garden row and knelt again.

“Bury them, too,” she said. “They’re, like, the fertilizer.”

“I see. But what happens when the plants come up? What’s the part that breaks the memory? What’s the part that makes it go away?”

“Fuck if I know!” Sondra said. She sat back on her heels, took off her hat, and hit him with it. “Haha!” she said, smiling, but he thought she looked panicked around her eyes. “I’m just gardening because I like it, actually. There’s no fancy plan.”

“Oh,” Jim said. “That’s… allowed?”

“I suppose it must be. Nobody’s given me any shit yet. I’ll come up with something. What’s the hurry?” She moved closer to him until their hips were touching. Then they weeded awhile in silence, until she said she had psyched herself up enough to plant some parsnips. She insisted on spitting the seeds into the little holes, so Jim did that too, and he stayed with her until the air started to cool and the sun was going down. He liked the dirt on his hands, and the pressure of Sondra’s shoulder and hip against his own, and he liked not thinking, for a little while, about who or what or whether he was going to forget. Which was probably why she asked, after another long spell of quiet, “Are you like me?”

“Maybe,” Jim said. “Probably. Do you mean tired?”

“Square peg,” she said. “You know, No-Fitty.”

Jim squinted at her.

“I mean,” she said, “do you think it could possibly be worth it?”

“What?” Jim asked, though he knew just what she was talking about.

“ Forgetting them,” she said softly.

He took her dirty hand with his own, thinking of all the wrong things he could say to her. Don’t you think your husband would want you to live? Wouldn’t he want you to get on with your life? Those were the things you could never say to someone who is grieving. You could only notice for them when they finally start saying such things to themselves. “I think we have to make it worth it,” he said to her. She took her hand away.

“Yeah. Well, I asked Alice for my money back, you know. Me and Joe, we were supposed to come together. And Polaris — Old Polaris, 1982 Polaris — they said that we could. He said he’d be right behind me, the last time we said goodbye, though he was healthy as a horse. That didn’t matter, anyway. If he outlived me by thirty years, he’d still be here now. But you know what Alice told me when I asked where he was?”

“I know,” Jim said. “You still have to forget. It’s hard. It’s so hard. But maybe you’ll meet again on the other side. Even not remembering.”

“What’s the use of being together,” she asked, “if you can’t enjoy it?” She snorted. “Anyway. I just want my money back. But you know what Alice said to that? ‘Money hasn’t existed for quite a while now.’ ”

Jim stayed with Sondra a little longer, not saying anything else, just trying to comfort her with his presence. But the truth was she was making him very sad, and also making him want to get to his own work before he felt too sad to start it. He told her it was becoming too dark for him to see what he was doing. “That’s okay,” she said. “I can do this with my eyes closed. I’ll see you at dinner.”

Jim went up to his room. He lay down on his bed, closing his eyes to concentrate fully on conceiving of his method. Sondra had helped him in one way at least: exposure to her sad nostalgia had fertilized wistful memories of his own, and now he could feel them starting to grow, pressing against his awareness, demanding to be examined. It would have been so much nicer to just go to sleep, but instead of doing that he kept very still in his mind. Then when he felt a little prepared for it, he began to survey them, rejecting almost every memory as too precious and therefore too hard to start with.

Stories, he decided. That’s what he would do. He’d put the memories into stories, and when he recognized the person, place, or thing of the memory, when he felt it, he would end the story and the memory at once. Jane’s mother presented herself right away as his first subject, and though he very swiftly arranged a fatal car accident for her in his imagination, he was unable to let her get in the vehicle. Jane he rejected out of hand — surely she would come last in this process. He also pushed aside a whole host of unpleasant memories: his mother’s horrible death, his own accident, the babies he and Jane had tried to have and the one that they very nearly did have. Even though he’d already learned a style of happiness, in his old life that involved keeping things like this always half-forgotten. Starting with the babies felt like the wrong kind of practice. So he came back eventually to the cat.