“Mind surgery?” he asked, turning around. But now he was alone in the woods. “Alice? Hello?” He thought he heard her sigh behind him, but when he turned it was nothing but trees. “Goddamn,” he said. They’d been walking only for an hour on the way out, but it took him almost five to get back, and he might never have found his way if he hadn’t crossed his own lost wandering path in the woods and been calm or exhausted enough to notice the tingle in his feet when he went where his marvelous new toes had already been. It ought to have been nicer to be alone then, once he knew it was just a matter of time and distance before he came back to the house. But loneliness made the wrong kind of room in his head, inviting anxiety instead of exultation, and nostalgia for all the things he was supposed to remember so he could forget them again. Might he be able to live without Jane, he asked himself, if he couldn’t think about her all the time? Wasn’t that just what happened, when you finally outlived your grief?
Except she might not really be dead. She might be here, challenged like him to forget her old life in order to start a new one. He closed his eyes and leaned against a tree and curled his toes up so he could think about that. They’d started over before. That would be nothing new. They’d started over, for instance, after his accident, though not in the dramatic way Alice was talking about now, what with the total forgetting and the absolute requirement that fate bring them together again, since he and Jane wouldn’t know anymore to look for each other. He could almost believe it might happen — just waking up in the future was already proof of the impossible, after all. But he couldn’t imagine that Jane wouldn’t somehow feel what he’d done, when they met again on the other side of amnesia, or that she could ever forgive him for it.
Always together — he’d promised it too. Never apart. Of course they’d both broken that promise over and over, mostly in imaginary ways, the sort of daydream unfaithfulness and desultory withdrawal that Jim thought were necessary to keeping faith. His Polaris contract had been something like that, a way to withdraw from his wife without actually withdrawing, a potential withdrawal, a theoretical betrayal. Except now, ages later and yet quite suddenly, it was real.
Eventually, Jim caught a glimpse of the house, and then a whiff of dinner, and felt how hungry he was. And maybe because his ears were as special and as new as his feet, he heard the laughter and clink of glasses long before he got back. There was nothing forced about his big relieved grin when he arrived to see all his new peers and their social workers gathered around the farm table for his welcome feast. When Jim walked in, they cheered. “I’m so proud of you,” Alice said, after they had all introduced themselves, and Jim had bowed at each of them. Then, with a bowl of cool water and a warm towel, Alice washed and dried his feet.
When she went back to her place at the table, Jim took the only other open seat.
“Are you like me?” Sondra asked him when he sat down.
“Like what?” Jim asked.
“Lay off him,” said Franklin. “Can’t you see he just lost his training wheels?” He passed Jim a glass of wine.
“Like, old,” said Sondra. “I bet you’re from 1970. Am I right?”
“Sort of,” Jim said. “In 1970 I was ten years old.”
“Lay off,” Franklin said again, putting an arm around Jim. “Can’t you see he’s a newbie-delirious?”
“I’m all right,” Jim said, draining his glass and holding it out for Sondra to refill. “I like this wine. I’d kind of like to taste it with my toes.”
“Ha!” said Franklin. “Just wait till your tongue really kicks in.”
“Everything is better here in the future,” said Sondra. But she rolled her eyes.
Jim really did like the wine. He really liked the food. He really liked talking to Franklin and Sondra or even 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?