Chris Adrian - The New World

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 Feathers’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.