Chris Adrian - The New World

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.