The New World: A Novel (2 page)

 

In darkness, he understood these words:
Greetings and salutations
!
Except the words were not exactly spoken, and Jim did not exactly hear them. Once upon a time he had wondered aggressively what it would be like to hear voices, and tried to imagine his way into the head of the psychiatry patients who always insisted that the boxes of tissues or the window blinds were piteously weeping and who asked, when he tried to pray with them, why no one ever wanted to minister to the inanimate, who needed and wanted it more than most of the living could ever know or understand.
Is this what that
’
s like?
he asked himself now, realizing, as he asked this one, that there were other, more pressing questions. So, in the absence of a mouth and a tongue, in the absence of air, he asked,
Am
I alive
?

You have always been alive
, he was told.
But now you are awake.

He remembered, in a very remote and stale way, a great panic at dying, and asking someone—not God, of course—for just a few more minutes, and he remembered how he had understood in his body that he wasn’t going to get them. Much fresher than the memory of dying was a memory of terrible, terrible pain, and he tried to decide whether he had simply been dreaming of pain, or if it was agony to come back to life, or if the pain of dying could not abate if you never actually died, or if he had simply been in some kind of Hell. He supposed it didn’t matter, so he decided not to ask.

Who are you?
Jim asked.
Where am I? Why can
’
t I see you
?

There are short answers and long answers to all those questions. Which would you prefer to hear? There is time for either or both
.

Let
’
s start with the short ones.

I am your (social worker). You are at (Polaris). And you are not trying hard enough to see me.

(Social worker)?
Jim asked.

Yes. It is a word you know, but it does not entirely suit the present context.
Hence (social worker).

(Polaris
)
?
You mean, it worked?

Of course.

It really worked? I’m really alive?

You have always been alive.

He thought to himself,
I am alive
!
, very subtly aware, in this new state of being, how thinking to himself was different from (speaking). Alive in the future! How about that? He waited some period of time—it was hard to tell if it was a minute or a month—to feel excited or exultant, but the notion of life remained only merely supremely
interesting
.

But am I all here? I don’t feel entirely like myself. Or am I on some kind of drug, maybe a tranquilizer?
Because I’m in the hospital?

You are not on drugs. Neither are you in a hospital. But you are here and not here. Right now, you are only the leaven of your
connectome
.

My what?

Your
connectome
.
The totality of your neurological connections.
Your quantum self.

I don’t think I understand.

Of course you don’t. We are getting ahead of ourselves.

I see.
He paused another (moment).
And why can’t I see anything? Did you tell me that
I’m not trying hard enough to see you
?

I did tell you that. But I should have said
n
ot trying at all. There is a short and a long solution to that problem. Would you like the short solution first?

Yes, please.

The short solution is
t
ry
harder.

Try harder? Like to wake up?

You were never asleep. You won’t fully understand until you make your (Debut).

My (Debut)?
Like cotillion? Or like on Broadway?

It is the culmination of the third and final cycle by which the leaven of your
connectome
expands to inhabit every space of your personality within a new body, learns and forgets what it must know and cannot know to live in the future, and joins with us in fellowship. The sequence is thus: (Incarnation); (Examination); (Debut).

I don’t understand!

Yes. There you go again.

Getting ahead of
ourselves
?

Indeed. You should ignore everything but the one thing. Do you remember what that one thing is?

Trying harder?
To see you?

Yes, exactly.

Jim noted the absence of eyelids to shut tight, or hands to squeeze into fists, or buttocks and a jaw to clench—everything he was accustomed to doing when he was really trying at something. Instead, he tried to muster their interior equivalents, opening a door in his mind onto scenes of struggle: squats and jerks and lifting a corner of the refrigerator, and arguments with the head of the hospital about funding for the Clinical Pastoral Education program, all times when he was full to bursting with what he wanted. And yet all of these interior equivalents felt, as he deployed them, like they were not enough. He tried another sort of effort—it felt like what he did when he was praying as hard as he could, which he had once described to a nonhumanist chaplain who had expressed doubt that somebody who didn’t believe in God could pray, as an effort like
internal pooping
. That was better, divorced, as it was, from physical effort, which was clearly the wrong thing to bring to bear on this situation. But now, instead of having a general sense of being suspended in darkness that was neither warm nor cold but without any temperature at all, Jim was falling.

Falling became an occasion for panic, but it also offered him a first lesson in how he must proceed. He wished he had taken a little more time just to chat with his (social worker), since it was clear to him that he was failing now
because
he was trying, falling only because he had conceived of the space through which he could fall. He thought of a rope, and there it was, at once an idea and a mental object. The rope wasn’t enough to stop him falling—he slipped from knot to knot to knot. But now he had shown himself the distance between try and do, and offered himself a solution: if he wanted to
see
her, he must
conceive
of her. Except what he really meant was (conceive), since what seemed clearly called for was a different kind of thinking and conceiving, a different kind of mental effort, than he was used to, some kind never needed before by anybody and so at the very least unused throughout the history of man, if not actually uncreated. And if this was the short solution to his problem, Jim was suddenly afraid of finding out what the long one might be.

But then, (grasping) the last knot on his rope, there came a flash of light. It was exactly the sort of light that explodes in your interior perception when you stand up into an open cabinet and smack your head, or someone punches you in the eyeball. He pulled himself up, quickly exhausting not just the rope, but the very idea of pulling. He (moved) into notions of pushing and twisting and thrusting, and from there to notion-motions for which he had no name except (dance): tense, generative gestures that seemed to create not just the space but the sheltering dimensions through which he traveled. And each gesture was part of a loud, conscious fuss over enormous concepts:
NO I don
’
t want to die
and
YES let me see your face, let me see your body and my body
, and
LET ME SEE THIS NEW WORLD!
There was color in the light, and then the light and color bled profusely, establishing and populating Jim’s whole field of vision.

He was outside, on a farm. There was the house, and the barn, and the silo, and the big blue bowl of sky with clouds in the shape of elephants and castles and whales. What a beautiful world! And there was his new friend—he thought she looked beautiful before he thought she looked strange—sitting patiently above him at the center of a silvery web, waving four arms and blinking at him with very tiny but truly luminous blue eyes.

Greetings and salutations
!
she said.

 

Jane’s reverend mother presided over Jim’s funeral, which was not at all the service he had asked for. Jane barely had attention for any of the details, but she was peripherally aware of her mother shouting at Jim’s friends when they called to complain. Jim had wanted a pagan Viking service, complete with basso chanting and a flammable boat set alight with a fire arrow as it drifted away from the mourners. Instead of that, her mother had arranged a Unitarian Universalist service heavily inflected with her native Congregational elements, though Jane’s mother said over and over to Jim’s friends that she would keep mention of Jesus to a minimum. Once Jane talked briefly with Dick—he called just as she picked up the phone to continue her assault on Polaris Cryonics Incorporated. “We all
promised
him,” Dick had said. “You promised him it would be a certain way, and now you are breaking your promise.”

“Well,” Jane had replied, “he broke a promise too, didn’t he?” She meant his marriage vows, one of which had been, at Jim’s own insistence, that the two of them would remain together
beyond death.
At first that just meant they would be eternity to each other. Then, later, Jane understood it to mean they would cleave to each other beyond the efforts of their individual experiences of grief (past, present, and future) to drive them apart. Which it did try to do, over and over, and yet they always managed (sometimes triumphantly, she would like to say) to muddle through.
Always together, never apart
was what they had promised, even if they never quite permanently vanquished their respective intimacy issues. But now Jane was quite sure that remaining together
beyond death
meant nothing at all if it didn’t mean that neither of them would sign up alone for an afterlife—and never mind that it was as fake and stupid as any scheme of ordinary religion. The whole terrible surprise of this Polaris Incident, as her mother liked to call it, felt somehow like Jim had left her for somebody else, like infidelity added to death. If she thought for a minute that he would understand, Jane might have tried to tell these things to Dick, before her mother took the phone away from her and hung up on him.

Jane stood for the hymns during the service but did not sing. Her aunt Millicent, who had arrived as always in tow with her mother, warbled prettily beside her, her voice very much like her sister’s, but without the confidence, strength, or control. Millicent had been out of her mind with dementia for almost five years. “As the deer panteth for the water,” she sang, smiling, “so my soul longeth after thee!” When she saw Jane looking at her, she winked, and Jane thought,
E
xactly
—this whole thing is a practical joke
. She knew already from her work—because her young patients sometimes died—how the world could seem unreal to the bereaved. That was something Jim used to talk about all the time, how he had spent the afternoon on the moons of Jupiter or in darkest Narnia, when he meant he had been professionally immersed in somebody else’s grief. It was all supposed to seem unreal or impossible, but it wasn’t supposed to be ridiculous.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Jane had asked Brian, the Polaris customer-service representative, “that you think what you did was legal?”

“Of course, Dr. Cotton.” He had a quality to his voice that she would describe to her mother as
furry
, meaning that when she tried to picture what he looked like she could only visualize a teddy bear, its face stuck in a stupid sympathetic half-smile. “Can you imagine that we would offer our service if it wasn’t?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s legal in
Florida
,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right. That doesn’t mean I won’t have the health department come confiscate every last drop of liquid nitrogen in your filthy buckets.”

“We call them dewars. And, Dr. Cotton, I just want to tell you that everything you’re feeling is perfectly normal.”

“Normal?” she said, and then she shouted, “I don’t think you people are allowed to use that word!”

At the funeral, they sang “Abide with Me” and “When We Were Living” and listened to a succession of eulogies. Jane’s mother had sat up all night writing a sermon on the death of Abigail Adams, in which she expounded upon the gifts of time and silence, but it was Dick and his friends, who sat in a block and wore Viking helmets, who gave most of the speeches, telling stories—each one felt more endless than the last—about Jim at work and at play.

Jane tried not to listen to any of the eulogies because it felt like all the speakers were conspiring to make her break down. Now she appreciated how fire arrows and a hurly match and Renaissance Fair turkey legs and even the burning boat and burning body would be easier to deal with than this train of perfectly sincere people who wielded their affectionate memories of Jim like heavy cudgels, all aimed directly at her face. And how many times could somebody hit you in the face before you started to cry?

Millicent was lifting her dress by slow inches and looking slyly around the crowded church. She rarely disrobed completely, but she liked to flash her panties. Jane gently smoothed the dress down over Millicent’s lap, then pulled her aunt’s head to her shoulder. Dick had ascended the pulpit to imagine out loud the wonders of the future into which Jim would wake. He told them all not to be sad, because Jim wasn’t
really
dead: When you thought about it, he had just undertaken a truly remarkable
journey
. Dick confessed he’d been just as astonished as anyone that Jim had arranged to take this particular journey, but wasn’t that exactly the gift he had left them all, the very good news that every one of them could follow their dear friend into the future and
be with him forever
? He said more, but Jane plugged her ears and leaned forward, trying to look funeral-casual, as if she were overwhelmed with sadness rather than anger and disgust. She did not stand up and shout,
That
’s not how it was supposed to be!
She and Jim were going to be together forever in oblivion, and now this fool was inviting the whole church to an imaginary afterlife that Jane wouldn’t have any part in.

“It’s a mistake,” she had told Brian. “You have to understand. He wouldn’t have believed in what you do. I know he wouldn’t. He didn’t believe in anything but
right now
.”

“I know it must be a shock,” Brian said. “And I’m very sorry. But it happens very commonly. I can tell you you’re not the first spouse that’s been surprised like this.”

“It’s not what he
believed
,” Jane said, as if Brian simply hadn’t heard her. “And what you’re talking about isn’t even possible. So, please, just tell me what I have to do to get his head back from you.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Cotton,” he’d said. “What you’re asking for—
that’s
not possible. The way we understand the situation, that would be like killing him. Do you see what I mean?”

She did not see. Or rather, all she could see when she tried was Jim’s head frozen in a block of water, an enormous novelty ice cube. Or she saw his head being lowered by the hair into a bubbling and spitting pool of liquid nitrogen, then accidentally dropped on a marble floor, his features scattering every which way in shards. Or she saw his pale bloodless face suspended in a tall jar of blue barbershop disinfectant, eyes lifeless but not blank, still full of horror at how he had fallen for a bait and switch. She demanded proof that they had actually done what they had been contracted to do, that they hadn’t just wrapped his head in toilet paper and tossed it out in the hospital trash.

“Of course,” Brian said. “We maintain full video documentation of the vitrification process.” And while Polaris wasn’t required by any law to show that to her, they certainly would, if she wanted them to. Did she want them to?

He waited very patiently while she failed to answer, not hanging up or even asking if she was still there. And when her silence transitioned to quiet sobs, he waited even a little longer before he said, “I really am sorry, Dr. Cotton. I’m so sorry for your perceived loss.”