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

decide. She wasn’t deciding to do this any more than you decided to bleed when someone stabbed you in the heart.
Okay,
she wrote.
Okay. Tell me how this is going to work.

 
    Jim had gotten into the habit of waking up early to work on his book of stories—there would be one for every memory he needed to capture and destroy. Some were very short, only a sentence or two. Others were a couple of paragraphs, and a few were ten pages long. But none of them tried to do anything but represent his feelings for a person, place, or thing that had been part of his own life. When a story was done, he flipped the page and started a new one, and he never looked back. He’d been at work on it for almost three weeks, and had no idea what he’d written, since as soon as he finished a story and turned the page, the thing it was about vanished from his mind and his memory. But though he felt lighter somehow when he looked at the fat wad of pages he’d covered already, he also knew how much work he had yet to do. He hoped it would all fit in one book, since he meant to burn it when he got to the city for his Debut.
    At 3:30 in the morning, the house was always dark and still. Jim would creep down to the kitchen for coffee, and then go to his office, a tiny room on the third floor that faced the front of the house. That morning he had just put his head down at his desk to consider a next line, and fallen asleep, then woke at the noise of the front door shutting. Rushing to the window, he saw Franklin depart the house.
    Something in the way that his friend held himself as he walked to the bus kept Jim from shouting out congratulations. Franklin, totally naked, walked very carefully across the lawn—it was a surprise for Jim to see him naked, but it made sense that Franklin would cast off all unnecessary accoutrements before he left the house and even that he would
go naked
into the future. That was all of a piece with Franklin’s artistic and dramatic style of mental evolution. Shouting during Franklin’s ceremonial walk would have been like clapping at a funeral, so Jim ran back to his desk and made a sign in big block letters:
Good Luck
,
Friend!
But Franklin didn’t look back once on his way to the bus—it had fat puffy tires and though it rolled all over the lawn, the grass looked untouched where it passed—and once he was inside, the windows were too dark to tell if he was looking back. But Jim tilted the sign from side to side, and opened his mouth as big as a singing Muppet to make soft congratulatory crowd noises, and he kept waving until the bus passed over the roadless hills.
    “Something wonderful has happened!” he said to Sondra at breakfast, and showed her the sign he had made. He was intoxicated with happiness for Franklin, though still he ought to have anticipated that Sondra might be sad about it, and so he should have broken the news to her more gently. As soon as she understood, she started to cry.
    “I’m just so happy for him,” Sondra said, but Jim could tell that was for the benefit of all the other faces around the table. You weren’t supposed to cry when somebody moved out of the house, you were supposed to applaud or cheer or propose some variety of toast. So Sondra pushed her tears away with the heels of her hands, and rang her glass with a spoon with all the others in salute to Franklin’s achievement.
    After breakfast, when she and Jim had gone into the garden to work on their respective projects, Jim sat down next to her where she was kneeling and said, “I’d have to be a very sorry sort of chaplain to believe those were happy tears.”
    “But you’re not a chaplain anymore,” Sondra said, not looking up from her rhubarb. “Now you’re a
novelist
. Like Jackie Collins.”
    “Well, not exactly.”
    “Sure you are,” said Sondra, as she stabbed at the rhubarb with her shovel.
    Jim moved away a little, and turned his attention again to his book, trying to think about what to write next. A