Free The New World: A Novel by Chris Adrian, Eli Horowitz

he
felt
it, he would end the story and the memory at once. Jane’s mother presented herself right away as his first subject, and though he very swiftly arranged a fatal car accident for her in his imagination, he was unable to let her get in the vehicle. Jane he rejected out of hand—surely she would come last in this process. He also pushed aside a whole host of unpleasant memories: his mother’s horrible death, his own accident, the babies he and Jane had tried to have and the one that they very nearly did have. Even though he’d already learned a style of happiness, in his old life that involved keeping things like this always half-forgotten. Starting with the babies felt like the wrong kind of practice. So he came back eventually to the cat.
    It was just a cat, after all. And he was only lying in bed, after all. He would tell himself a story in which the cat—the whole cat, the idea and the substance of it, what the cat had been for him and who he had tried to be for the cat—was perfectly represented, or as close as he could manage, and then perfectly eliminated.
Once upon a time,
he told himself,
there was a cat named Feathers. “What a strange name for a cat!” people said, whenever she introduced herself, which hurt
Feather
s
’s
feelings very much.
    When he was done, when the cat was strangled, when he could feel the horrible dead weight of it in the exquisitely sensitive hands of his story, he cried himself to sleep, acutely aware that this was a worse pain than anything he had known yet here in the future. But when the bell rang for dinner, he woke refreshed, and he felt a little better, not about the cat (what cat?), but about everything else.

 
    “I had a bad feeling about that man,” her mother said, by way of comfort for the dead lawsuit. Jane had gone right upstairs and gotten into bed with her clothes on when she came home from Flanagan’s office. Her mother was standing in her bedroom door.
    “Who are these people?” Jane asked. “That they could do something like this?”
    “You’re making some very broad assumptions,” her mother said.
    “Well, he didn’t just go on vacation, did he?”
    Her mother shrugged. “Maybe he’s fleeing his creditors, or the
ABA
. He’s probably in Tahiti with Wanda, if that was even really her name, counting your money on the beach.”
    “Mother, he never even charged me anything.”
    “New Jersey has been full of derelicts and thieves for decades,” her mother continued. But then she sighed hugely. “Darling, what can I
do
for you?” Jane asked her to bring the computer and a glass of wine.
    Jane went back to the Penelope Project.
Listen to me!
she shouted.
They killed my lawyer!
But the conversation scrolled on serenely, so she wrote,
Stop talking about tea! We are all in terrible danger!
    In danger of becoming seriously
annoyed
,
wrote Iphigenia7. And Jane got two frowns from Helen22.
    What’s wrong with you?
Jane wrote.
I don’t understand!
She got another frown.
I don’t understand you stupid people!
Then the frowns came in a staccato burst, and Jane found herself recoiling from her computer screen, overwhelmed with the notion of three dozen faces (even the lurking ladies were coming out of hiding to frown at her) crowding one another out of the way to show her their expressions of displeasure. And then she actually started to cry, wishing she could tell Jim that the computer had hurt her feelings, or even just tell her mother that all the other hens were pecking at her like a diseased chicken. After a few minutes the laptop began to chime softly at her, as if in apology. When she raised her head up from her arms she saw that she had ended up one frown short of a lifetime ban, and that someone called Hecuba66 had invited her to a private room to talk. She accepted the invitation and typed, with one finger,
Hello?
Hecuba wrote back immediately.
    Sorry about them. They’re cowards.
    Really?
    Of course. I was listening to everything you