The New World: A Novel by Chris Adrian, Eli Horowitz Read Free Book Online Page B

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?
    After they’d eaten the cake, everyone moved outside to continue the party on the patio. Jim didn’t join in when others removed their clothes and slipped into the hot tub. He didn’t protest when Sondra sat on the edge of his chaise, or when she took his foot in her lap and began to massage his heel. “I like a nice handsome foot,” she said.
    “My toes are very sensitive,” Jim said.
    “And I like a nice hairy foot. Joe had feet like a hobbit.”
    “Who’s Joe?”
    “Nobody,” she said, squeezing too hard. Jim winced.
    “Gently,” said Jim’s Alice, coming up behind the head of Jim’s chair and laying a hand upon his shoulder. “Those toes are brand-new sensory organs.”
    “Sorry,” Sondra said, throwing his foot down. She walked away, shedding her clothes on the way to the hot tub, stepping in just as Ahh! was standing up in the water to show everyone her ambiguous genitalia, wet enough now to start swelling up like one of those compacted foam dinosaurs you might put into a child’s bath. Jim turned his gaze away to Alice, who was staring at him, as friendly and serene as a sloth. “I think it’s past my bedtime,” he said to her, and she took him up to his room and tucked him in.
    “Welcome, welcome,” she said again, kissing Jim’s forehead. She paused at the door, which made