Chris Adrian - The New World

At the bottom of the pyramid, in a bold, nacreous space font, they’d written Choose life .

It was bright daytime on the front cover; on the back it was night, but the pyramid was full of light. Jane opened the brochure to the first page, which was all pearl-white text on a background of a color she now officially recognized and hated: Polaris Blue.

And the facing page said simply:

Welcome to Polaris.

Welcome to Our Tomorrows.

Welcome to Abundant Everlasting Life.

Without reading any more, Jane tore the whole thing in half.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “What did you do ?”

She knew better than to watch the dvd ; she only stared awhile at its soggy wrapper, wet with chicken fat and stuck all over with the leaves from her mother’s after-dinner tea. Jane could imagine a whole host of people telling her not to look at it: her mother, of course, who didn’t even like an open casket at her funerals, and who would say you ought not to watch something like that until time told you that you absolutely had to, which probably meant never; Maureen would have said it was something akin to operating on your own husband or your child; Dick would say she should watch it only in the company of Jim’s friends, and only with a big bowl of celebratory funereal popcorn. Jim himself would have said she ought only to walk into that sort of trauma hand in hand with him. But she didn’t listen to any of them, or even to herself. This is a terrible idea , she said. She went upstairs with the dvd , the bedroom dark except for the light thrown off by the computer screen. She watched the whole thing once, straight through.

Then she went gliding through the dark house, ostensibly, at first, for a drink of water, though in the bathroom she didn’t even reach for the tap but only stared at her shadowed reflection, trying to discern the expression on her face. And she swept into her mother’s room and stared down a few moments at the sisters in their beds, listening to them breathe the way every parent listened to their child, in worry or wonder. She wandered up and down the stairs, stepping softly and very quietly, trying not to startle herself by making a noise. Then finally she went down to the basement to look at Jim’s amateur sculptor’s tools, lingering over the brutal flat chisels, before she came to herself, a little ashamed at how she was deliberately toeing the line of hysteria, when she knew very well she could just take what she had seen to bed with her and hope uneasy sleep would eventually claim it.

She went to the kitchen meaning to get her glass of water and go directly back to bed. But when she turned on the light and saw the head-shaped roast her mother had left defrosting in the sink, Jane dropped her glass and screamed and screamed and screamed. Her mother swept into the kitchen, grabbing a dishtowel and throwing it over the meat in one fluid motion, then gathering Jane in her arms while she said firmly to Millicent, “Get rid of it!” Jane kept screaming while Millicent took up the roast and rushed it outside. The floodlights came on in the backyard as she ran out, so Jane could see her clearly through the window as she rushed up to the fence to shotput the meat onto the neighbor’s patio. Millicent ran back with her hands over her ears, like she was anticipating an explosion. By the time she returned to the kitchen, Jane had transitioned to sobs.

“How thoughtless of me, to leave something like that for you to find in the sink,” her mother said, but Jane didn’t want to talk about it. She let her mother guide her around the broken shards on the floor and accepted a new glass of water. In her room, she lay down and closed her eyes. She waited, but of course she couldn’t sleep, with Jim’s vitrification on a looping display behind her eyes, and with that line from the video narration running around and around in her mind as if drawn behind a plane on a banner: Next, the cephalon was separated with an osteotome and mallet . Whatever it was they put in him, whatever it was that flushed his cheeks with cold, whatever it was that turned his face to glass, it made him look very much alive and in a state of perfectly horrible agitation.

Brian picked up his phone right away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t think… I assumed this would go to voice mail.”

“It’s my cell number, Dr. Cotton,” he said sleepily. “And I’ll answer anytime you call.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. It made her even more angry that he had answered. “I was only calling to tell you that I’m going to sue you. It only seemed fair to warn you.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “That’s all right. Good for you, Dr. Cotton.”

“You know? What do you mean you know?”

“It’s all right, Dr. Cotton. We understand why you might want to sue. It’s perfectly understandable.”

“I don’t want your understanding. In fact, I want you to stop using that word. I want you to give me back my husband’s head.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Cotton. I know you want us to do that, but you must know by now that we can’t. And I celebrate that you want it. I really do. We all do.”

“Don’t tell me what I want! Do you know what I want? I want to destroy you!”

“That’s all right, too,” he said. “If it will help you, you should try.”

“Doesn’t that bother you at all?” she asked. “Doesn’t it bother you at all that you cut off his head with a chisel?”

“This isn’t about me, Dr. Cotton,” he said. “All that matters is that you do whatever you need to so you can come to terms with your husband’s decision and be at peace with it. Polaris has extensive resources, Dr. Cotton.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Wilson?”

“It’s our guarantee , Dr. Cotton. I myself am one of those resources, allotted just to help you, to be there for you for as long as it takes.” When she didn’t reply, he added, with the unclean sympathy of a funeral director, “And you really may find, in the end, that you want to become a member too. You wouldn’t be the first person to follow their spouse into the future, you know.”

“You’re a monster !” she said, and hung up.

She lay there awhile, panting furiously in the dark, but she didn’t start crying again. And angry as she was now, she felt sure she could sleep, because now she had something to do in the morning. No matter how much time, effort, or money it took, she was going to destroy Polaris. It was the first really comforting thought she’d had since Jim died, and she cuddled up with it, imagining, as she settled her face deeper into her pillow, the glass pyramid falling into broken pieces. She had just drifted off when her phone woke her with a ping, to show her a text message from Brian, We R Here 4 U, and then a little yellow face, not smiling or frowning or grimacing, but serenely absent of expression. Its eyes were closed, as if it were peacefully asleep.

When Jim had stopped crying so hard, he took notice of his hands and feet and the pressure of the sheets against his skin. He could tell by the sharp noise of birdsong and by the quality of the air that a window was open, and he could tell from a soft noise of breathing that he was not alone. He opened his eyes and saw Alice sitting in a wooden chair next to his bed. Now she wore her own pale round freckled face, her features a mix of races he’d never encountered before. She looked like a redheaded Korean, and if he hadn’t been so sad he would have laughed in surprise.