Chris Adrian - The New World

Brian’s office was a wide stretch on the second floor with a view through a stand of poplars to the lake. Poppy left her standing at the glass wall, giving her one last long frown before she went. Brian came in and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it before she let him turn her around. His large soft beard made his whole face seem soft, and his eyes were in fact as black as the buttons on a teddy bear’s face.

“Dr. Cotton,” he said at last, but only after Jane had started to cry. “Welcome. Come sit with me.” He led her to a conference table and pulled out a chair.

“I have nothing to say to you,” she said. Taking the Kiss in its envelope from her pocket, she put it on the table and said, “I only came up here to give you this. It’s some kind of poison or whatever. It will shut down your dewars. Thaw your heads. But it’s over now. I just wanted to see his face. Or something like that.”

“I knew it!” Brian said, pounding the table with one hand and making a kind of wiggly, celebratory motion in the air with the other one. He was just as young as he had sounded — far too young and handsome, she thought, to be caught up in this atrocious business of death, but then she always thought that when she met a young, handsome funeral director or pathologist, one who looked as if he should smell like a sweaty boy instead of formaldehyde and sweet rot. And the beard! It was as soft and curly as she had imagined, identical in texture and length to his hair, so the overall effect, with his plump cheeks and black button eyes, was that he seemed to be peeking at her from behind a bush. He took her hand, catching it again when she pulled away. “I knew you would do it,” he said.

“Do what?” Jane asked.

“Pass the test,” he said, indicating the unopened envelope on the table with his eyes.

“Do you mean to tell me…” she began. “Are you saying that Flanagan, and the chat room, and the Kiss…?”

“It was all a Willy Wonka mindfuck!” Poppy shouted joyfully, suddenly behind her.

“Where did you come from?” Jane asked.

“I’ve been here the whole time,” Poppy said, sitting down now and taking Jane’s other hand, so she was captured between them. “Did you get the plans?” she asked gravely, then giggled. “It was me. I’m Hecuba.” When Jane only stared at her, she said. “Hecuba66!”

“I think she understands, Poppy,” Brian said, in his gentle funeral-director voice.

“I don’t,” Jane said, pulling her hands away and standing up.

“We like to be sure of people, Dr. Cotton,” Brian said. “We have to be sure of people. And now we are sure of you.”

“Sure of what?”

“Sure of your love! Your love of your husband. Your love of life. Your love of us. You could have chosen death , but you chose otherwise. You chose life. ”

“You must have me mixed up with my husband,” Jane said, though she thought it would be wonderful to believe all the things he had always said about life and love and being together forever, since maybe they would all remain true even if only one of them believed them. They’d traded off believing in them , after all, hadn’t they? She tried very hard to remember. Always together . But sometimes it was only one of them doing the work to keep them never apart.

“He loved everybody,” she said. “And I love him , but everybody else I pretty much hate.” Still trying to be angry, all she could manage was to be annoyed by the way Brian was staring so hard at her, and by the way he kept saying her name like he was savoring it in his mouth. “What?” she snapped. “What do you want from me now? Should I just go home, or are you going to press some kind of fake industrial espionage charges on me?”

“Dr. Cotton,” he said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that you are home.” He was staring at her with such total sincerity that she could not pull her eyes away to roll them at him and at Poppy, at Jim, at the whole absurd situation, and the ridiculous pyramid and the ridiculous city and the tasteless trash heap of a state. She couldn’t even blink. “Your home is with us because his home is with us. Your home is with your husband. Don’t you understand? You can already be together forever .” A contract had appeared on the table. He laid his hand across it.

“Really?” she said, beginning to cry, now not only for anger or for grief. “You really believe that?” She reached for Brian’s face, and tugged gently on his beard.

“Really,” he said, so full of his good news. “Really!” He was weeping also, and Poppy was hyperventilating, and Jane felt suddenly aware of all the other people in the pyramid, on the balconies and coigns of the upper levels, other boys with soft beards, and girls with protractors in their hair, lovers and dreamers and frightened selfish fools. She put her other hand in Brian’s beard and held on to his face, knowing, in a way that entirely transcended time, that he had grown the beard so she could shake his face just like this . “Brian,” she said, and he just kept smiling and crying. “Oh, Brian.”

“Dr. Cotton!” he cried out joyfully. “Jane!”

“Oh, Brian.” She sighed again. “Poor Brian. You don’t understand — none of you do. Don’t any of you get it? Don’t any of you understand what forever actually is ?” Then she cast his face away — who knows where she found the strength? Jane cast Brian Wilson at her feet, and Poppy stood frozen when she walked out of the office. She got in the little clown car from the future and started to drive, not sure where she was going, and not sure if she would even be allowed to escape the Polaris campus, let alone this pathetic and ridiculous situation of her life, if they would capture her and forcibly transport her to the future, or have her arrested for her own part in their conspiracy to break her heart. But she didn’t care. Really, she didn’t. Wherever she was going, whatever was going to happen, this moment alone was enough to hold and sustain her. Does this thing have a radio? she tried to ask of the air, because she wanted to make herself laugh, as the great glass doors opened after all and she drove out into the flat Florida glare. But she only said, to the full absence of him, “Jim, I’m coming,” and made herself cry harder instead.

In darkness, he understood these words: Greetings and salutations! Except the words were not exactly spoken, and Jim did not exactly hear them. Once upon a time he had wondered aggressively what it was like to hear voices, and tried to imagine his way into the head of the psychiatry patients who always insisted that the boxes of tissues or the window blinds were piteously weeping and who asked, when he tried to pray with them, why no one ever wanted to minister to the inanimate, who needed and wanted it more than most of the living could ever know or understand. Is this what that’s like? he asked himself now, realizing as he asked this one that there were other, more pressing questions to ask. So, in the absence of a mouth and a tongue, in the absence of air, he asked, Am I alive?

You have always been alive , he was told. But now you are awake.

He remembered, in a very stale and remote way, a great panic at dying, and asking someone — not God, of course — for just a few more minutes, a few more words. He remembered how he had understood in his very body that he wasn’t going to get them. Or was the panic about something else? He complained: My heart hurts.