Chris Adrian - The New World

“I’ve got stamina,” Jane said, looking at her reflection as her mother made a bun out of her hair. In the reaches of the mirror, Jane could see Millicent dancing, Jim’s oversize headphones on her head and his old iPod in her hands. Millicent would not stop rummaging in his stuff. That was disturbing at first, but soon enough Jane didn’t mind it so much,⁠ and eventually she came almost to enjoy the sight of her demented aunt playing with all of Jim’s orphaned possessions.

Her mother shook her head. “Do you really want to get involved in this sort of thing?”

“I do,” Jane said.

“Hmph,” her mother said. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to be your Starbuck.”

“Or you could just be my mother?” Jane said, and she could tell that hurt her mother’s feelings because Millicent stopped dancing, sat down on the bed, and started to cry. “It’s perfect,” Jane added, touching the bun, remembering Jim’s voice, not so long ago, telling her to be nicer to her mother. “It says, Serious Lawsuit Lady .”

Her mother sat down next to Millicent on the bed and gave her a hug. “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked. “Did you want your hair done up as well?”

Brian had texted that morning to ask Jane how she was feeling, and instead of ignoring him Jane had replied, “ Litigious .” He texted every single morning and called every other afternoon, but after the night of the brisket she rarely replied and spoke to him only once, after buying a digital recorder from a spy store in Midtown. She called him to say she had received the very informative Polaris brochure. Then, with her recorder running, she told him, on the record, that she would sue him, and asked if he had a statement about that.

“Well,” Brian said. “I can tell you again that’s very normal.”

“Is that your way of telling me not to bother? It’s normal because it’s so common, but it never works?”

“I’m only trying to say that we here at Polaris understand what you’re going through, Dr. Cotton.”

“That’s just absurd, Mr. Wilson . That statement is absurd. Your company is absurd . The work you do is absurd . And your name, sir, is absurd .”

“It’s a very common name, Dr. Cotton. And is it really so absurd to think we might have seen you before, or someone like you, and know from experience how you feel? Don’t you ever say that to your patients? I understand what you’re going through ? Or, I know how you feel ? Because you do meet them again and again, don’t you? All those very different people with the same or similar problems? In some way, don’t you know what’s going to happen to them?”

“How do you know I have patients? How do you even know my job?”

“We know all about you, Dr. Cotton. Of course we know. You’re part of the Polaris family, even if you’re not a member.”

“Did you just say you know all about me ?”

“We care about you, Dr. Cotton,” Brian said. “Because of your husband, for the sake of your husband, we care about you a great deal.”

She told the first lawyer, Mr. Jones, that she thought they must be spying on her, and played him the recording of her phone conversation with Brian.

“Well, I’m sure they do know a great deal. The application is incredibly intrusive,” the lawyer said. He was a friend of the hospital counsel and had handled a complicated vitrification patent dispute five years before in which Polaris had been a defendant. So he had, in a sense, sued them and won, though Jane knew soon after they started talking that he wasn’t going to take her on as a client.

“Look, I know my colleague told you that you’re overreacting,” Mr. Jones continued. “But I would argue that these people give one no choice. They’re too smug. It wouldn’t be the first time a plaintiff was caught between the law is on the other guy’s side and something simply has to be done. ”

“Then you’ll take the case?”

“Oh no,” he said. “I can’t. But I think I know someone who might.” He wrote a name down and shook Jane’s hand and wished her good luck. She walked out feeling vindicated and disappointed at the same time. In the waiting room, her mother looked up from the Yale Law Review and asked, “Shall we go home now?”

“For a little while,” Jane said. It was a week before she got an appointment with another lawyer in what became a lengthening chain of referrals, but the next one came just a few days after that, and soon enough she was being passed off from one person to the next all in the same day. Within a couple weeks, they had spiraled from the Upper East Side down to Midtown, then up to Queens and finally out to Flatbush before they landed in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, in an office belonging to Mr. Daniel Flanagan, a puffy-faced man with the biggest hands Jane had ever seen. Strangling hands , she thought approvingly, probably because he had actually played a murderer on television, which she knew because his waiting room was decorated with the framed stills from the episode.

Wanda, Mr. Flanagan’s receptionist and wife, had greeted them and asked them to sit down in the waiting room. The coffee table was full of Playboy s and a single black nsv Bible. Her mother and her aunt each took up something to read, while Jane filled out a short questionnaire about the nature of her problem, then wrote a summary in the space provided on the last page: My husband’s head was taken from his body and frozen by a suspicious company and while it all appears to have been technically legal it is unbearable. Please help me get my husband’s head back!

Jane always studied her patients’ questionnaires before she met them, but Mr. Flanagan read hers as she sat in front of him, surrounded by the various diplomas and certificates on his wall. He had been to law school and the police academy and had done a master class with Joan Collins. He was certified as a private investigator by the Colonel of the New Jersey Police, and as a matchmaker by the Matchmaking Institute of Westfield. He had had his picture taken with the last three presidents of the United States.

“Jesus,” he murmured as he was reading, then “Jesus Christ!” and finally, after he had finished, “Jesus fucking Christ!” He put down the paper and reached over his desk to take Jane’s hand, chasing it and capturing it when she moved it away. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked her, very earnestly.

“I am not,” she said. Mr. Flanagan now began to pump her hand, as if to congratulate her for her strange tale and her unique problem and her furious anger.

“Wanda!” he said. “Come in here!” When his wife rushed in he gave her a few of the most atrocious salient details.

“Oh my God!” she said.

“Do you believe this shit?” he asked her. She said she did not believe it. She sat down next to Jane and took her other hand, and shortly after that called Millicent and Jane’s mother in as well. They never actually got around to a discussion of the legal merits of the case, and in fact Jane thought they would have felt a little irrelevant, had they come up. Mr. Flanagan and his wife did nothing but agree with her. They agreed that Jim’s body had been molested , that Polaris was indeed sinister and in fact disgusting , that no one should have insult added to injury the way it had been done to her. It was unfair and ridiculous . It could not and should not be borne . Jane started to cry, as much from anger again as from sadness, and Millicent was crying as well. Jane’s mother was frowning hard. Wanda was a total mess, and Mr. Flanagan’s bald head was almost purple.