The New World: A Novel (5 page)

 

“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.”

“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.

“I promise you,” he said, even though he had told her five times already that he wasn’t going to make any promises, “we’ll get him back.”

 

There was Sondra from Menlo Park in 1985 and her social worker Alice, and Franklin from Albuquerque in 1992 and his social worker Alice, and Judy from Detroit in 2035 and she had an Alice too. Everyone had an Alice, who were all (Jim’s Alice told him) of the same
presence
but not the same
substance
; they all acted and sounded like the same person, but no two looked the same. There was Brenda from Northampton in 2041 and her Alice, and Eagle from the Wisconsin Freestate Experiment in 2049 and her Alice, and Blanket from the United Islands of Atlantis in 2067 and her Alice. Folly, a tall black woman, came from an orbital ring habitat in the year 2085; her Alice was an albino. And then there was a thin person of indeterminate sex, who introduced itself to Jim as Ahh! from Lacus Oblivionis upon the moon, who had glowing multicolored hair and was translated in the year 2101. Ahh!’s Alice was as sexless as its client. In the evening of Jim’s first day, all his fellow residents in the halfway house celebrated his arrival with a feast.

“They think they’re special,” said Sondra, his leftward neighbor at the long farm table, “just because they’re from the future. Which could not be more relative. Right?”

“Exactly,” said Franklin, on Jim’s other side. “They may be from the future, but they’re not from the
future
. I bet you a hundred bucks we all get out of here before they do.”

“Is there still such a thing as money?” Jim asked.

“Who knows?” Sondra said, raising her glass as if to make a toast but only glaring at everyone. “We can’t know, can we, until we make our Debut. I like that.
Debut
.” She made jazz hands at them. “It sounds like the future is one big musical.”

Jim noticed his own Alice sitting in a little cluster of social workers, and waved. That morning, she had let him stare out the window until he cried himself out again, and then she said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” For a moment he thought she meant the pain in his heart, but of course she was talking about the view over the orchard and the creek to a series of rolling wooded hills. “Are we in California?” he asked her.

“No.”

“Italy? Tuscany?”

“No.”

“Where are we?”

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. She drew him out of the bedroom, pointing out his bathroom as they passed it and telling him she’d teach him how to use the fixtures later. She walked him through the house, identifying all the rooms, which she called not by their function but in association with some person she said loved it best. “And this one is Judy’s favorite,” she said in a little solarium upstairs from his room.

“Who’s Judy?” he asked. “Who are these people you’re talking about?”

“Your crèchemates, of course,” she said. “Now there are nine of you. We learned that too, that loneliness delayed or diminished the Debut. So we bring you out in clusters, for fellowship and for love, until your time here in the house is over.”

“Oh, I see,” Jim said calmly, though the thought of other people in the house made him want to start crying again. It was a few more rooms before he could ask, without his voice breaking, where they all were.

“Camping!” Alice said. “But they’ll return soon.” They were in the kitchen, Sondra’s favorite room, which opened directly onto the terrace. As Alice took him into the open air, Jim wondered if he was dressed properly to go outside—loose white silk pants and a sleeveless shirt—or if this was just what men wore in the future, Don Johnson pajamas, while the women all dressed like sexy nurses. Alice was patient when he slowed down and stepped cautiously on the terra-cotta tiles of the terrace. They were warm underneath his feet.

“Can I ask you . . .” Jim started to say, but she shushed him. They were entering the orchard—it was apple or pear trees or both. He couldn’t tell because the fruit was all so small and young.

“No questions. Just walking and listening. With your ears and your skin. Listen with your
toes
.”

“But what if
she’s
here?” Jim asked. “It’s not too crazy, is it? To think she might have followed me?” When Alice tried to put a finger to his lips he grabbed it and held on tight. “I won’t let go of your finger until you answer me.” But his hands were sweaty and she popped her finger out easily.

She sighed, then frowned. “If your former wife were here,” she said, “you would never know it. Not on this side of your Debut. The challenge is the same for all of you, no matter when you lived your first life. The same for woman, man, or other.
If
she were here, the challenge would be the same for her.”

“She’d have to forget me?”

Alice made one slow, grave nod.

“But then we might be reunited again, eventually, after the Debut?”

“You are facing the wrong direction,” Alice said, grabbing him by his shoulders and turning him irresistibly. “If you are going to speak when you ought to be listening, then you should at least ask questions that can be answered.” She gave him a push. “Now
listen
. With your toes!”

“But a person can’t listen with their . . .” he began to say, but his toes convinced him otherwise before he could finish his sentence. “Oh!” he said. It wasn’t really listening, of course, but his toes were taking information out of the grass that seemed to be more than just tactile. “Oh, that’s nice!” he said, going step by step through the orchard. Alice followed. “You will be ready to make your Debut,” she murmured behind him, “when you have utterly Examined and emptied yourself of every memory of your past. That is your
only
job while you’re here in the house. But it’s easier to consider, isn’t it, when you are listening with your toes?” They passed through the orchard and over the creek, then went farther, past a barn and through a meadow, up and down a hill and along the edge of a wood, Alice all the while describing what Jim had to do to become not just a visitor in but a
citizen
of the new world. “Incarnation, Examination, Debut. Always in that order. You’ve got to be empty before you can be filled. And yes, there will be a test here and there, and daily exercises to help you on your way, but we can’t really
test
you on this any more than we could
do
it for you. We’ve learned better than to try to decide for you what part of who you
are
doesn’t depend on who you
were
or who you
loved
. Not even our best quantum mindsurgeons would dare ever try to wield such subtle knives. So
you
have to do it.
You
find the memories.
You
make the cuts with a knife that
you
make
yourself
.” She was quiet then, though Jim could hear her stepping behind him—he was distracted by his feet and toes, so sensitive now that he barely had room in his head to appreciate anything except how it felt to walk on the damp green moss that covered all the ground beneath the trees.

“Mind surgery?” he asked, turning around. But now he was alone in the woods. “Alice? Hello?” He thought he heard her sigh behind him, but when he turned it was nothing but trees. “Goddamn,” he said. They’d been walking only for an hour on the way out, but it took him almost five to get back, and he might never have found his way if he hadn’t crossed his own lost wandering path in the woods and been calm or exhausted enough to notice the tingle in his feet when he went where his marvelous new toes had already been. It ought to have been nicer to be alone then, once he knew it was just a matter of time and distance before he came back to the house. But loneliness made the wrong kind of room in his head, inviting anxiety instead of exultation, and nostalgia for all the things he was supposed to remember so he could forget them again. Might he be able to live without Jane, he asked himself, if he couldn’t
think
about her all the time? Wasn’t that just what happened, when you finally outlived your grief?

Except she might not really be dead. She might be here, challenged like him to forget her old life in order to start a new one. He closed his eyes and leaned against a tree and curled his toes up so he could think about that. They’d started over before. That would be nothing new. They’d started over, for instance, after his accident, though not in the dramatic way Alice was talking about now, what with the total forgetting and the absolute requirement that fate bring them together again, since he and Jane wouldn’t know anymore to look for each other. He could almost believe it might happen—just waking up in the future was already proof of the impossible, after all. But he couldn’t imagine that Jane wouldn’t somehow feel what he’d done, when they met again on the other side of amnesia, or that she could ever forgive him for it.

Always together—he’d promised it too. Never apart. Of course they’d both broken that promise over and over, mostly in imaginary ways, the sort of daydream unfaithfulness and desultory withdrawal that Jim thought were necessary to keeping faith. His Polaris contract had been something like that, a way to withdraw from his wife without
actually
withdrawing, a potential withdrawal, a theoretical betrayal. Except now, ages later and yet quite suddenly, it was real.

Eventually, Jim caught a glimpse of the house, and then a whiff of dinner, and felt how hungry he was. And maybe because his ears were as special and as new as his feet, he heard the laughter and clink of glasses long before he got back. There was nothing forced about his big relieved grin when he arrived to see all his new peers and their social workers gathered around the farm table for his welcome feast. When Jim walked in, they cheered. “I’m so proud of you,” Alice said, after they had all introduced themselves, and Jim had bowed at each of them. Then, with a bowl of cool water and a warm towel, Alice washed and dried his feet.

When she went back to her place at the table, Jim took the only other open seat.

“Are you like me?” Sondra asked him when he sat down.

“Like what?” Jim asked.

“Lay off him,” said Franklin. “Can’t you see he just lost his training wheels?” He passed Jim a glass of wine.

“Like,
old
,” said Sondra. “I bet you’re from 1970. Am I right?”

“Sort of,” Jim said. “In 1970 I was ten years old.”

“Lay off,” Franklin said again, putting an arm around Jim. “Can’t you see he’s a newbie-delirious?”

“I’m all right,” Jim said, draining his glass and holding it out for Sondra to refill. “I like this wine. I’d kind of like to taste it with my
toes
.”

“Ha!” said Franklin. “Just wait till your tongue really kicks in.”

“Everything is better here in the future,” said Sondra. But she rolled her eyes.

Jim really did like the wine. He really liked the food. He really liked talking to Franklin and Sondra or even just looking at them and all the others, each of them dressed alike but very different-looking, having died at different ages and in different times.
I’m not thinking about anything but right now
, he said silently, not sure, under the influence of the wine, if he was talking to Jane or to Alice.

“Hey,” he said to his new friends, lowering his voice. “Tell me about the mind surgery.”

“The what?” asked Franklin.

“Mind surgery. My Alice said I was going to have to cut out my own memories. So how do you
do
that?”

Franklin laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, pouring Jim more wine. “Not on your birthday. You’ll figure it out later. We all did. Tonight, you should eat, drink, and be merry.”

The others followed Sondra when she raised her glass a final time, and they all took up a cheer for Jim. Then each of them walked over and knocked glasses with him while Franklin stood by to refresh their wine, and Sondra just sat, staring at their housemates as they came and went, not saying a thing, but matching Jim sip for sip. By the time the cake came out she was as drunk as he was.

“I’ve been waiting for a special friend to come,” she said to him, hanging hard on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” said Franklin. “She said that to me, too. She says that to everybody.” Sondra flashed Franklin a finger, but Jim didn’t pay attention to their argument. He was watching his Alice as she rolled a cake, nine tiers tall, toward the table.

“Happy birthday!” the Alices said, and the others all said it too. Sondra shouted and sobbed in his ear until Franklin drew her away. Alice pulled Jim up to the cake. “Don’t forget to make a wish,” she said. The others began to murmur and then sing again, “Welcome, welcome,” and even in the humid air, warmed by their collective breath, he could feel the heat of the cake’s single candle as a discrete warmth on his face. Jim closed his eyes and made his wish, which was a question directed not at God, who had never really existed for him, but at everyone he had ever loved when he was alive: at his childhood friends and the teachers who had changed his life; his parents and his aunts and uncles; his adult friends and colleagues; the patients he had loved as a doctor and the patients he had loved as a chaplain; and the friends he had never physically met but with whom he felt close in spirit, Bugs Bunny and Batman and Valentine Michael Smith and Billy Pilgrim and Harry Potter, Pope John
XXIII
and Maya Angelou and Michelle Obama. And then there was Jane, who was, after all, the only person he really needed to ask:
Please, can I stay here and live?