The New World: A Novel (12 page)

“Ashes to ashes,” he said to Charlie, who asked for a smiley face on his bald spot instead of a circle on his forehead. “Dust to dust. From dust thou were made, to dust thou shalt return. Remember that now is all that you have, forever.”

Charlie laughed. “Just this part, actually,” he said, gesturing with a spotted hand at everything below his neck. “The top piece has got a lot longer.”

“Excuse me?” Jim said, and Charlie explained: the application, the dewars, the glorious future.

Why the fuck would anybody
do
that
?
Jim wanted to ask, but he asked instead, “Why do
you
want to do that?” They talked for a half hour—Jim sensed a need, and he would have stayed even longer if it hadn’t been the busiest day of the year, but Charlie only wanted to talk about the future, not his own ambiguous grief at the approaching end of his life. So Jim closed the visit with a prayer to the Great Spirit of Eternity, holding hands with Charlie and asking that his frozen sleep be brief, his freeze damage be minimal or nonexistent, and his life beyond life be forever flourishing.

“Amen to that shit,” Charlie said, but he had tears in his eyes. Then he asked why Jim wasn’t wearing a circle or a smiley face of his own.

“Well, you don’t really do it to yourself,” Jim said. “But one of my colleagues will do me up later. It’s like when the waiters have dinner after the restaurant closes.”

“I’ll do it right now,” Charlie said, “if you want. I’m qualified, right? A fellow atheist?”

“Sure,” Jim said. He handed over the pot and sat on the bed with his face turned up and his eyes closed.

“Ice eternal,” Charlie said, making the circle in three short rough sweeps. “Life to life. Remember that you don’t ever have to die.”

“Except that I do!” Jim added, opening his eyes to see Charlie’s wide grin. “Amen!” Jim bowed and left the room.
The patient is a citizen of Spiritual World A
, he would write in the chart (and later, in his book, as he recounted the story to no one at all, for the purpose of forgetting it utterly), meaning that he knew what he knew, spiritually, and a chaplain wouldn’t do him any clinical good by sowing doubts in his mind or trying to shake up his placid unquestioning faith.
He describes himself as an atheist, but really he worships God as the Future.
Back in the Pastoral Care offices, Jim ran into his boss. “Jesus, Jim!” she said. “It’s Ash Wednesday, not fucking Pictionary!”

“What?” he said. She raised her hand in a furious salute, one finger pointing stiffly at her forehead.

Jim went into the bathroom to see that Charlie had drawn a triangle on his head. Jim wiped it off, feeling conned. Back when he was a chaplain intern, still afraid to pray with his patients, he once bargained a sweet old lady into leading their prayer together, thinking that would allow him to avoid having to call out to anything or anybody he didn’t believe in. She’d agreed, but only after he promised to repeat what she said word for word, so she tricked him into throwing himself on the mercy of Jesus, and dedicating his life to Him forever. She had grinned in just the same way that Charlie did, and Jim felt just as dirty afterward, having been sanctified to a final principle that went against everything he believed in. He wanted to go back up to Charlie’s room and shout at him, to ask him if he had ever made his life mean something, if he had ever dared risk everything with another terminally human being, dared love somebody knowing in your bones that this life was all you had. But he knew that wouldn’t make somebody like Charlie understand.

So I waited all day to talk to my wife,
he wrote in his book. Since she was the only person—she always had been—who could really understand why his day was so upsetting. He went home early and waited for her, perusing the Polaris website so they could look at it together, covering their mouths and pointing. She texted that she would be late coming home, and as the hours passed Jim flipped back and forth between the website and the sort of tasteful porn he used sometimes to rev himself up for her, since he wanted nothing more than to erase the mark on his forehead by rubbing his face over every part of her body.
There you are, I said, when she came home,
and she smiled and said she was sorry for being late
.
She came over to ask what he was looking at, close enough that he could
smell
her, and then really
see
her, and understand what she had been doing. He closed his computer and said, “Nothing, really. Nothing at all.”

And that’s how I met Alice,
he wrote. Not right away, of course. He kept on learning about Polaris because he was still waiting to tell Jane all about it, after she told him her own news, when her fidelity finally moved her to confess her affair while confessing would still have
meant
something. The flirtation with Alice, when it started, was just something to do while Jim was waiting for Jane to come back to him.
Or else,
he wrote,
it was just a perfect complementary affair,
illusory until it wasn’t, perfect because it signified a more complete withdrawal than anything she might manage. And yet, if she had only done what she had promised she would, he could have deleted his Polaris account. But instead he found her with her lover at breakfast, and two days later he went to Oviedo to sign the papers.

 

Jim stared at his neat blocky handwriting, half-expecting the words to disappear while he watched. But he never forgot what he wrote until after he closed the book, marking whatever he was working on as
finished
. He’d never flipped back the pages to see, but he expected the words were all still there, that the people and ideas they represented disappeared only from his mind, not from the page. If the words actually disappeared, then he wouldn’t need to burn the book, would he?

He made another kind of note, on a single sheet of paper, adding to a list of things he wanted to ask Alice. This was a good idea in theory, but in practice it was a little more complicated, since he had no idea anymore what the questions referred to, and didn’t dare look back to check. So he hadn’t asked her any of the questions yet. Still, he would add this one to the list:
No. 12: Do I really have to burn the book?
Meaning, he supposed, did he really have to destroy the memories, once he had forgotten them? Maybe it was a theological distinction, to say that these people and things could be
dead
to him
and yet
alive to themselves
within the pages, only waiting, like the famous cat in the box, for someone to look in before they could live and breathe again within the sacred spaces of memory. Which is perhaps something he had already considered, and what he meant when he wrote
No. 6:
But what about the cat?
or possibly
No. 9: Mystic memory? Chords of memory? The whole universe as recording medium? Immortal memory? Living vs Dead = ROM vs RAM?

“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.