Chris Adrian - The New World

“Alice!” he shouted, not closing the book yet. “Alice! Get up here!” He had discovered, in the weeks since Sondra had died, that they would tolerate all sorts of rude behavior in the house, and the only reason they hadn’t brought him his meals in his room and excused him from every last social obligation before now was that he hadn’t demanded it. The work was everything, Alice told him. That’s what he was there for, and she was there to help in whatever way her experience and Jim’s own best interest permitted her. He could have asked the house, in a much quieter voice, to pass on a message, but he preferred to shout. Shortly, she appeared at his door.

“Yes?”

“Come sit down,” he said, with his finger still on the page, preparing himself to ask what he wanted to ask. He wrote it down instead, holding a finger up at her to wait. Can’t I keep this memory? he wrote. Since it hurts?

“Was there something I could help you with?” Alice asked. “Would you like some tea?”

Jim stared a little longer at what he wrote, then closed the book and looked up at her. “Never mind,” he said. “False alarm. Sorry.”

“I am here to serve you,” she said, rising and bowing.

“Wait!” he said when she’d just passed into the hall. She came back.

“Yes?”

“I changed my mind,” he said. He wanted some tea, after all.

“Good,” she said. “Tea is lovely in the afternoon.”

“It certainly is,” he said. She left him at his desk and went to fetch it. He was crying again, but already he didn’t know what for.

There were all of Jim’s clothes to take care of. Her mother told Jane she should just leave them as they were for a few months. They were in their own closet, after all; she could just shut the door. There might be the temptation, of course, to go into the little room and cuddle with the empty suits, to take luxuriating draughts of air flavored with the smell of his shirts and his shoes, and this wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, her mother said. If there was one thing that forty years of ministry had taught her mother, it was that no two people grieved in the same way . Still, she said, we all make such rooms, cabinets of the mind into which we may retreat and imbibe like air the memory of the beloved.

But Mr. Flanagan all but ordered Jane to empty the closet. “Just make sure the base station is plugged in,” he said, and Wanda reminded her to make sure to write in her journal as soon as she was done sorting the clothes. This work was a surefire way to jack up her mental-anguish numbers, and Flanagan said he wanted a good run of hard data before seeking a formal injunction against Polaris. “The complaint itself will be just the prelude to a double shit-ton of supplementary material,” he told her. “They’ll give up before we even begin.”

So Jane collected her grief button and got started one afternoon, abandoning her lunch. Her mother was cooking aggressively — mostly from scratch, but also altering the gifts of food from the hospital chaplains, sniffing and tasting other women’s dishes to rehabilitate them, somehow managing to store them in the weeks after they arrived without ever again subjecting Jane to the sight of frozen meat. That day she had made a dull casserole almost delicious just by adding a little rosemary and cutting the canned tuna with fresh fish. Millicent was getting noticeably fatter, but Jane, never hungry, had lost weight, and her mother announced she would stay as long as it took to get Jane back to her usual size.

“We’ll be right up to help!” her mother called out as Jane climbed the stairs, and she stared a long time at the closet door before she entered, imagining it padlocked or barred or crossed with caution tape. She held her breath as she went in, taking only a quick tasting gasp, and discovered that the little room smelled mostly of his feet, from the shoes standing in neat rows on risers along the wall. And because his feet smelled like her feet — this had not always been the case but was one of those marital convergences that she thought might have presaged their coming to look like sister and brother in old age — there was nothing nostalgic, in neither the gratifying nor distressing sense, about the odor, and it was not something she’d be able to escape by shutting the door and running away, unless she could manage somehow to outrun her own feet.

When her mother and Millicent came up, Jane had only moved the shirts and pants and suits around from bar to bar, making hanging piles for the Salvation Army and Goodwill and the local hiv charity, trying to decide which clientele would most desire a pair of green velour tracksuits. Millicent took one from her and embraced it like a lover.

Jane sat on the floor and poked absently at Flanagan’s button. Her mother kept trying to send her to bed, since she and Millicent had the project totally under control, but Jane wouldn’t go. It felt more and more like being at the funeral again — watching other people bustle about on Jim’s behalf while she just sat there and watched, suspecting that none of it was any more real than a dream she kept having, in which she sat on their stoop watching a boy-size Jim licking a popsicle that was an exact replica of his head. Every night she watched him, and he watched her back with a dull, lazy look, exactly the way some wary, bored child might look at you over his ice cream. And always, eventually, he held the stick out to her, and without any hesitation at all she took a long lick up the side of the nose. It tasted like peaches.

“Look what I’ve found, Jane. You don’t want to give this away.” Her mother was holding a piece of heavy paper in her hands while Millicent looked over her shoulder and made a sad purr. Jane hadn’t known that was in here. She thought Jim would have put it in the safe. “Do you remember this?” her mother asked stupidly. It was not a birth certificate or a death certificate, or even a baptismal certificate. It was more like a little crafts project, something one of the nurses had led them through after the stillbirth, the hands and feet recorded forever (or as long as paper might last) in blue-black ink.

“Oh, that…” Jane said, pressing her button furiously as she got up to go lie down on her bed. “You can just throw it away.”

She lay facedown on the bed with her arms out beside her, utterly still except for the spasmodic clicking of her thumb, and even that died away as she remembered that Polaris had nothing to do with this particular anguish. Her mother didn’t have to step out of the closet for Jane to hear her in her head: One death recalls another, and whenever somebody dies on you, everyone you’ve ever lost dies again . But it wasn’t as simple as that.

That last almost-baby, all the almost-babies (not so fully formed as the last one, in his delicate and excruciating little nose and fingers and cheeks and toes, but not much less real for that) and also the hosts of theoretical babies, the ones they might have had or might yet have been trying for, had gathered together into a single entity, a confederated accuser who had prosecuted vigorously against the meaning of Jane’s life. She and Jim had eventually, on the other side of her stupid affair, found a way to live a defense together, though Jim always had his crazy chaplain ways of thinking about it, and she had her own ways. But they hadn’t had to agree on everything to make the defense work. The question now — and she started clicking vigorously again as she understood this — was how she was ever going to win this new case, when Jim, her partner, her chief counsel, her only real friend, had gone over to join the prosecution. This has nothing to do with the baby! she wanted to shout at her mother, who, worse than being right all the time, was always just barely wrong.