Chris Adrian - The New World

“This was not her first incarnation,” his Alice said, a little sadly.

“Or even her second,” said Sondra’s. “Though she stayed with us two weeks longer this time.”

Alice patted Jim on the head and explained that they would begin the process of waking Sondra again tomorrow. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “It’s not like she’s exploded . Sondra’s connectome endures.”

She led Jim out of the room, and the three of them went back downstairs to break the news to the others. Heads shook but no one shed a tear, and dinner went on as if nothing of particular note had happened. Jim got very drunk, and moved around the table, gathering rsvp s for the funeral service and saying, “Someone has died !” To which the reply was always, “But not really ,” and eventually Alice asked him, politely but firmly, to stop saying that, and when he didn’t stop, she escorted him up to bed.

“But what about the latest part of her?” Jim asked her as she tucked him in. “The part since you woke her up. Isn’t that part dead?”

“Well,” Alice said thoughtfully, though she looked a little exasperated at the question. “I suppose it is.”

“But isn’t that terrible ?” he asked. “Don’t you think that’s terrible ?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not particularly terrible. This iteration of Sondra wished to destroy itself, and now it has got what it wanted. Tomorrow, the iteration of her that wants to live forever will awaken again. What’s terrible about that?” Alice’s smile was so genuine and unconflicted that Jim wondered for a moment before he fell asleep if it wasn’t so terrible after all. But he woke three hours later, sober and ill, to remind himself that at least the latest iteration of Sondra should have a funeral. He turned on his light and walked softly to his desk. Turning his book over and flipping to the end of it, he spoiled page after page with a funeral sermon for his minimally deceased friend.

The next day was a holiday (which nobody would hear of canceling): a new client had come to the house in the night. Jim asked stupidly if it was Sondra come back again already, but Alice only shook her head. Still, he sneaked out of his room when the social workers told them all to disappear so the new client could have a tour, but all he saw was a head of short dark hair disappearing down the central staircase, followed by a social worker whom he’d never seen before.

No one volunteered to help with the service. “I like a Viking service best,” Jim said to Alice, “and I think Sondra would have too. Though of course we didn’t talk about it. What do you think?”

Alice said the manufacture of loveliness was always to be encouraged, but asked him if he really thought a funeral was strictly necessary.

“Yes!” he said crossly. “It really is!” He calmed down as he set up the chairs outside. He supposed he couldn’t expect Alice to really understand anything about a funeral. They probably didn’t have them anymore, in the future.

He put the chairs in a semicircle, a safe distance from Sondra’s bier, then made the punch and cake, and reviewed his sermon. He’d hardly ever presided over a formal funeral, though he’d given dozens of little services in the hospital, rituals tailored on the fly to the needs of the survivors gathered around the late person always (even if they had been dying for weeks or months or years) so suddenly and shockingly dead. The mourners usually seemed to him to be waiting for someone to organize their grief, to close the endlessly strange, eternal moment of death enough for them to escape it, however briefly, and leave the bedside and the body and the hospital behind. Not that everybody needed this done for them, but the people who needed it the most seemed never to know to ask for it.

He laid the hymn he’d chosen down on each chair, weighting each paper with an apple from the orchard so it wouldn’t blow away, and he scattered some apples on the bier (not thinking, until much too late, that along with the applewood fuel they would make Sondra, as she burned, smell a little like dinner) and straightened Sondra’s robe, and moved the chairs back a bit more, and then everything was ready.

He waited as long as he could stand to before he started. He went inside once to call up the stairs, “Hey, everybody, it’s time!” but he didn’t go knock on any doors. A few of them, including his Alice, came to their windows to look at the fire once it really got going. “My dear friends,” Jim said to the empty chairs, “let us celebrate the life and the memory of an extraordinary human being. Let us celebrate the story of our friend, and hold the meaning of it together, in this moment which we sanctify together in love.” He paused.

He didn’t ordinarily need notes for a funeral. If he had time, he’d write out an order of service and a sermon, but he didn’t ever read them — they always stuck in his head. Now, though, everything he’d written down so carefully the night before was lost to him, even though he’d been careful not to put it in his book, and been careful not to think of it, as he wrote it, as a story to forget. Nonetheless, that ten-minute story of her life, her fiercely striving, fiercely loving existence, was gone. He could just go upstairs for his notes and read them aloud, but he didn’t want to go inside.

Instead, he sat on the grass next to the bier, and never-minded the sermon and the absent audience. He just talked to her.

“Well, my friend,” he said. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye. To this part of you, anyway. I feel that we’ll meet again, though you won’t know me, will you? Maybe, after my Debut, I’ll come back here as a social worker. I wonder if that’s allowed? If anybody but an Alice could do it? I think it would be a good idea. You know, like how in halfway houses the counselors were usually junkies, once upon a time. Which is exactly what makes them good at their job.” He scooted closer to the bier and took an apple from among the wood, polishing it nervously on his shirt.

“I usually have all sorts of things to say to a dead person,” he told Sondra. “You know, ‘You will be missed. Your life mattered. I could feel the love your family has for you when I walked into the room.’ Half-made-up, of course. But half-true, too. Or true because I believed it, if that makes sense. True for that moment, anyway, because I chose for it to be true, with every death. It’s different when everybody else has left the room. When it’s just you and the body. I have all these lovely one-liners, but I can’t really say them now. I haven’t forgotten them all. I just don’t know what they mean anymore.”

It was the taste of the apple that made him burst into tears. Of course he had cried during funerals all the time, but it was unprofessional to sob . He knew he couldn’t have looked very dignified, with snot in his mustache and apple bits inside his mouth, but he kept talking anyway. “They should know it, shouldn’t they? They should know back home, back then, that we might be sad too. They should think about how we’re holding funerals too, way out here on the other side of life, for all of them. They should all stop thinking about themselves sometime — it’s so selfish , isn’t it? — and think for a minute about how we’re the ones who are actually alone. About how they left us .” He sat and finished his apple, and then he lit the fire.

He added his chair to the flames, and then the other chairs too, and then as many vegetables as he could pull out of the earth, tossing them from a distance as the fire burned hotter and hotter. It was a shame, then, that the others weren’t there, because it would have been nice for everyone to throw a carrot or something on the fire. So he kept an eye on the door into the house, telling himself that his anger toward the others would be undone if just one other person came out to say goodbye to Sondra. Nobody came out, but he could see through the window that they had started to gather in the kitchen. Then, just at the tail end of dusk, a stranger emerged from the orchard, bramble-scratched and sunburned and dehydrated-looking. “Thank goodness for that bonfire!” she said. A tall girl with a pixie haircut, she looked too young and too pretty ever to have died. “I might never have found my way back if I didn’t see it! I’m Olivia. You must be one of my crèchemates!” She stuck out her hand.