Chris Adrian - The New World

Yes. I’m sorry about the (pain) . He tried to decide whether he had only been dreaming of pain, or if it was agony to come back to life, or if the pain of dying could not abate if you never actually died, or if he had simply been in some kind of Hell. He supposed it didn’t matter.

(Pain)? he asked. And then, after something like intuition, something like memory, (Pain.) (Book.) (Funeral.) (Alive.) And after that: (Alive!) (Book!) (Funeral!) Then: (Book) (Book) (Funeral) (Funeral) (Alive) (Alive) [Book Funeral Alive] (Alive) (Alive) (Funeral) (Funeral) (Book) (Book). And finally: Alice!

Yes, Jim , she said. Welcome to Cycle Two.

Cycle what? Jane! Oh God!

Cycle Two. It comes after Cycle One.

But I failed. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t forget her. How could I do it?

Yet you tried. You tried very well.

I did?

Assuredly .

But that’s horrible!

No, it’s wonderful. I was, and am, so proud of you.

Incarnation, Examination, Debut — was that all a lie, then?

Not at all. But each is both a local and a universal process. Do you understand?

He did, right away, wishing he didn’t. You do it over and over?

Yes. Until you (arrive)! Are you ready? Would you like the long answer to the question of how we proceed from here? I believe you are ready for the long answers now. When he didn’t respond, she asked again, Are you ready?

No .

Very well. We will rest awhile. We could rest for an age, if you wish. There is time.

I mean , Jim asserted, I’ll never be ready.

But you already are ready.

No. I don’t want to be ready. Alice, I don’t want to. When she didn’t reply, he added, a little desperately, Don’t you understand? I want my life back.

You mean you want to be alive! she corrected. You cannot have your life back. That is exactly why it must be forgotten. Do you appreciate how much you have learned? You are already so much more like us!

But I want my life.

You cannot have it. But you can be (alive)!

Life , Jim repeated, not sure whether he felt like a child or like he was reasoning with a child.

Alive! Polaris Client 10.77.89.1, this is what you wanted! This is what you chose. And then, more gently, she added, You will be in love again. Do you think no one is in love in the future?

Who cares about love? Jim replied. That’s the easy part. It’s only the first part. We were in life together, Alice. We were in life! And if we aren’t together now, then we weren’t together then? Do you understand?

She didn’t understand. Then they started to fight, at first only with notions and assertions and words, until Jim added thrusts of (imagination) to his arguments, so for a few timeless moments he was a pig trying to crush a spider under his little hooves, or an old man hitting his nurse with a pillow. Then Jim was asserting his hips against her hips, or blowing out a match every time she struck one alight. And then for a while she was showing him images of surpassing loveliness, portraits from the future calibrated just to the edge of his ability to recognize them as more beautiful than alien, which Jim answered, again and again, with an image of the dull white bone at the bottom of the wound in Sondra’s throat. But eventually all Jim was asserting to her was: (Life) (Love) (Memory). And all she was saying in reply was: (Alive) (Love) (Alive). And at last he overpowered her, or she relented. She put them on a flat green field under a cloudless sky. A hot-air balloon was tethered directly behind her.

“Are you really sure?” she asked weakly.

“Yes,” Jim said. “Just let me die. Turn it off, whatever it is. I’m ready.”

“But I don’t understand,” she said very sadly. “We do not understand.”

“There’s another way to be alive,” he said. “To have been alive. I barely understand it myself. I don’t have time to explain!”

“Then goodbye, Jim Cotton,” she said, stepping out of his way. When he had clambered into the basket and turned around, she was part of a crowd of bodies, but her face was the only one that he could see clearly.

“Hurry!” Jim said as she fiddled with the lines. “Hurry up, before I forget!” No one helped Alice with the lines, but they were all waving handkerchiefs and cheering softly at him. “Goodbye!” he said, when he finally began to rise. “Goodbye, everybody!” Then his backward-drifting balloon had entered a cloud, or a wall of snow, or maybe all the handkerchiefs had taken flight to escort him to wherever it was he was going.

“Jane,” he said, just before he was nowhere and nothing at all. “Here I come.”

Jane lay in bed for an hour, not exactly waiting out the dark, though lately she preferred to rise in the light. She’d been getting up in darkness for most of her life, and had never been troubled by a dead stillness in a house, or the quivering gray static she saw when she stared long enough at absolutely nothing in a dark room, but now those things made her feel almost more lonely than she could stand. Her mother, whenever she sensed her awake and abed, encouraged Jane to sit outside on the terrace, so she might witness the remarkable transformations of the dawn and let some light into her soul . She never asked Jane if she and Millicent should go back home to Northampton, and Jane never told them to leave. But it was another advantage of waiting for the sun to come up before she got out of bed, that her mother would take Millicent for her long early-morning walk, leaving Jane to herself. They were always gone at least an hour, unless the weather was very bad, since Millicent had to examine every little thing as they went along, lingering with her eyes over flowers, light posts, and garbage cans the way a dog might linger with its nose.

Jane took her time making her morning tea, staring awhile at her mother’s extensive traveling collection before finally selecting a tiny can of matcha. She had no plans to become one of those ladies with bitter tea breath who sit around the house in an oversize cardigan with a giant mug in her hands, setting her face in thoughtful poses over the steam, someone who seems to turn tea into a companion . Even if she was wearing one of Jim’s cardigans, and permitted herself to look very thoughtful or sad standing by the kitchen window waiting for the water to boil, she knew this was an indulgence as temporary as her withdrawal from work, or her mother’s tenure in her house. She wasn’t going to become a tea lady . But for twenty minutes or so, it was nice to pretend she could actually enjoy a little shallow contemplative wonder.

She took the water off the flame just before the boil could really start to roll, having already measured two precise scoops of bright green powder into a cup with the long-handled wooden spoon that her mother sometimes wore in her hair. She poured the water (and lingered, yes, over the steam), then attacked it with the bamboo whisk, deliberately restraining herself from picturing a particular bearded face held still in a vise so she could attack it with vigorous zigzag scratches.

She drank the second cup down like a shot of liquor, then got back to work. Alice was there immediately when Jane clicked her icon (this made Jane think she must be running always in the background of the computer’s OS , watching and listening to everything Jane did, and so she started borrowing her mother’s laptop to talk with Hecuba). Alice’s eyes darted more slowly this morning, as if she were watching a very sluggish game of Pong.