Chris Adrian - The New World

“How could I have forgotten my wife ?” he asked her. Alice only stared at him, smiling very slightly. He lay in a very plain bed, in a very plain room, white in the sense of whitewashed, not sterilized or futuristic; a beach-cottage room. Sniffing through his dwindling tears, he caught Alice’s very particular odor, something like asphalt after a rain. “Are you sure you’re not a robot?” he asked her.

“I am not a robot,” she said, smiling broadly now. Then she added, “You are also not a robot, in case you were wondering.” Jim was putting his hands on his face and in his hair as she spoke. Then he gave himself a punishing hug, squeezing hard as if he might make himself pop.

“How could I forget my wife?” he asked again, trying to imply that he wasn’t going to get out of bed, that he wasn’t going to step into the real world of the future, until she helped him with this question. “Why did I do that with you?”

“Incarnation,” she said, as if that explained everything. “You were reinhabiting your connectome. ”

“My what?” Jim said. “I forgot all about the most important person in my life. And then I cheated on her!” He scratched at his face, but his nails were filed down well behind the tips of his fingers. “I don’t do that!”

“It was your way forward. It was your practice of Incarnation. No two methods are ever the same, but there are tendencies, and it is necessary that you find your own. Of course you forgot the most important person in your life. That’s precisely who you had to forget, in order to wake, and who you’ll have to forget again — and again and again — in order to stay.” Jim was still kneading his face, asking himself if it was cheating to fuck someone else if you had somehow temporarily forfeited the memory of your wife. Or was it still cheating if you were dead? A widow couldn’t, by definition, cheat. Sex in mourning might be hasty or in bad taste, but it wasn’t a breach of faith. So too might the departed be spotless. Except, he told himself, that he wasn’t actually dead. Now Alice was leaning against the far wall with her arms folded over her chest. She was scowling at him.

“You do understand,” she insisted. “You have discovered the better problem. Someone else might have spent some large part of forever trying to imagine the new world, never even conceiving of a challenge they might master in order to enter it. One reinhabits the connectome by a quantum process. How else would it be? Was it not that way for you, in your other, older life?” After a moment, she added, “Your face is not detachable.”

Jim looked at her from between his fingers. “You’re telling me that I had to forget her to wake up, and then I had to remember her to wake up again? And now you want me to forget her again ?”

“Except that, as I say, you were never really asleep. And you will have to forget not only your wife but anyone else to whom you bound yourself in love. You have had to take them back in order to now let them go. You had to remember them on your own, to prepare yourself to truly forget them all. We can’t do that for you.” She sighed, still gently scowling, and crossed the room to take his hands from his face. “It was an early lesson for us, how a client’s memories were both generative and destructive to the New Order of Being. When we gave them back, instead of allowing the client to discover them again, in his own time, in his own way — then there was always an explosion . But also, when we never returned them, when we never allowed the memories to be discovered — there was an even greater explosion. ” She made an expansive gesture with their hands, and a grumbling noise in her throat.

“Explosion?” Jim asked.

“Indeed,” Alice said, snapping her fingers. “Instantaneous Quantum Disintegration. Total Connectome Failure.” She paused, as if to give him a chance to consider whether he really wanted to know the gory details.

“Forget Jane? Forget everyone?”

“Exactly.”

“But how could I ever do that? Why would I ever want to?”

“Because you can live,” she said firmly, but she smiled. “And because you must . There’s no room for them here. You cannot be attached to your old life and expect that you can begin your new one.”

When Jim started crying again, she said, “It is good that you are upset. You are upset because you understand. Love and memory are powerfully elastic. If you do not cut the connecting strands, then they will draw you back into oblivion . But you will succeed in this, Jim. You are already on your way!” Now she was crying too — tears of joy, he supposed, but his were still bitter. She stopped talking for a while. She let him cry himself out. He remembered that very well from his old life, that place you came to briefly, when you’d cried all the tears you had. There had only been a couple times when he’d done that as a grown man, a couple worst things in the world that had happened to him, and always when he came before to that cried-out place it had been a very fatigued sort of peace that he had felt there. But now he wasn’t tired at all, and he felt too restless — too curious — to be at peace.

“Did you just say my name?” he asked. “I don’t think you ever said my name before.”

“Well,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I try not to get too attached, before a client Incarnates successfully.”

“That’s probably smart,” he said, and then they were quiet again for a little while. “I’m really here?”

“You are here , Jim.” She stood up, but didn’t offer him her hand. After a pause he lifted his legs and swung them to the floor.

“It’s very hard,” he said, at the feel of the wood, and he grabbed at the varnish with his toes, appreciating very distinctly the squeaking noises he made. “Should I try to stand?” he asked. She nodded. However long he had been whatever he was, asleep or frozen or suspended or dead, it ought to have been harder to stand up. His first steps ought to have been as halting as a newborn fawn’s, but his feet were perfectly confident and his legs were strong.

“Incarnation,” she said when he looked at her, making a gesture at him like she was pointing with her whole body. “It is thus.”

He put his hands out, as if doing that could help him with a mental unbalance. “Forget them?” he asked again. “Forget everyone? Jane and Millicent and Marilynne? Rudy? The cat?” He closed his eyes in a panic, because it seemed like anything he looked at in the room or in the whole new world would cost him some person or place or thing in the old one, but he opened them as soon as she told him to, and when she pulled him to the white-curtained window he went without much resistance.

“Everyone,” she said. “Every last one.” Did she have to be so happy about it? Though he was all cried out for the moment, he could feel his well of tears for Jane already filling up again. He wanted to see her face again, but at the same time, he wanted to see what was outside the window.

“I can’t remember the name of my cat,” he told Alice. “I don’t even remember what it looked like. Just when it died. That was in the fall of 2011. Kidney failure. But I forget its name.”

“And so we begin,” she said, parting the curtains and putting a hand at the small of his back, as if to keep him from turning away.

“Only an Ahab should ever sue in anger,” Jane’s mother told her while they were getting ready to go out on their first lawyer visit. “Do you have any idea how long these things take? You don’t have that kind of stamina. Nobody does.”