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 him feel like a child.
“Such a long day,” he said to her before she turned out the light and closed the door, though what he really wanted was to ask if they might not say a prayer together before he went to sleep, a prayer for the dead. Then it felt to him as if he spent the next few hours totally still in his body but restless in his spirit and his mind, trying to find the words for that prayer. How stupid, he thought, that no one ever pitied the dead for their grief, the religionists too busy making the hugely broad assumption that the dead were too distracted by bliss to miss the living, and the atheists thinking oblivion would be enough to comfort anybody who sustained that kind of loss. Now I am too sad to sleep, he told himself, wishing that he hadn’t retired from the fellowship of the party and the comfort of the wine, and he wished Alice had stayed with him, sitting by his bed and singing him to sleep. But then, as if it had sensed his mood and jumped into the bed to comfort him, the name was suddenly there with him. Feathers, he said to himself, just before he fell asleep. What a weird name for a cat.
1.9
Mr. Flanagan had a plan, which he and his wife described to Jane in a series of shouting emails over the next two weeks, each message filled with citations of supportive cases, and links to obscure Internet chambers where people murmured against Polaris and cryonics and longevitists and immortalists and futurists and even the very idea of the future itself. Wanda sent Jane frequent (sometimes hourly) supplemental updates on the research. It was Wanda who found the online support group for cryonics widows called the Penelope Project and strongly encouraged Jane to join. Look, she wrote, a group for people just like you.
Jane had a look, but didn’t stay long. It seemed merely to be a forum for women to congratulate one another on being lonely and depressed. She lurked invisibly for a while in the chat room, waiting for someone to be angry about what had happened to them all, but the five visible members were having only a very measured and passionless conversation about their grief work. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Jane announced herself with a post: Polaris is a monster. When the others ignored her, she tried again a few minutes later: Polaris is a fucking monster!
Clytemnestra111 responded: Hey language Polyxena3! This is a sacred space!
Jane wrote: Sorry but they are monsters you know. Don’t you think they are monsters?
Clytemnestra replied, Bottled-up sadness is the only monster, and then the rest of them followed:
Helen22 said: You never mind them honey.
Iphigenia7 said: There’s nothing you can do about them.
Andromache57 said: They’re just a red herring in your grief work.
Cassandra99 said: Andromache you mean a McGuffin.
Andromache57 said: I mean a red herring.
Clytemnestra111 said: They’re a distraction. We all fled into anger at one time or another, but that just keeps you from feeling how you feel.
Jane wrote: I know how I feel.
And Clytemnestra wrote: But do you feel how you feel?
I hate them, Jane wrote.
Helen wrote: Honey, it sounds like you’re ready for some Grief Work 101.
I don’t need Grief Work 101, Jane wrote. I need my husband’s head returned to me.
Grief Work is Good Work, Helen wrote. It’s not them you hate. It’s yourself. It’s your own grief you hate.
I hate them!!! Jane wrote, practically typing with her fists. And I hate you too. There were a few beats of silence in the room. Jane’s cursor was throbbing.
They always lash out in the beginning, Clytemnestra wrote.
Amen, wrote Helen.
Just give her some time, wrote Cassandra. I was like that at first. Wasn’t I like that?
You were totally like that, wrote Andromache, and Jane wrote, I’m still here. But they wouldn’t talk to her anymore, only about her, and before long the conversation had settled back into its original course, which was concerned only with holding fragile memories and cherishing lost moments and traveling metaphorically back in time to put all those shared moments that were your life together to rest like babies. You mean put them down like sick cats? Jane wrote, and then Or smother them like babies? and finally Or set them adrift like elderly Eskimos? Then she got locked out of the chat room because too many of the members had sent her a frown.
Mr. Flanagan wrote several times a day about his evolving legal plan, which Jane ever only partially understood. He told her that she didn’t have to concern herself with the three organizations who might be willing to file briefs of amicus curiae, or whether he could apply her suit as a mass action even if no one else joined her in her complaints, or whether Polaris, in as little as six months, could be served with a double-inverse injunction preventing them from freezing new heads, at which point he would have them just where he wanted them, and then he and Jane, and every other wife or husband or mother or father or sister or brother or lover or very close friend who had lost some beloved body to their gruesome experimentations, could start to really make them pay.
All Jane had to do, he told her, was stay connected to her anger and grief, which meant remaining acutely aware of how Polaris was ruining her life, and interfering with the natural course of her grieving, and causing her mental suffering. In doing that, she would generate the soul of their case, and so her mantra, until their day came in court, must now be document, document, document. Wanda gave her a journal — not a book but a secure Web address with a word-processing app featuring a triply redundant save feature that printed Jane’s entries automatically every morning in Flanagan’s office. Wanda locked the pages in a fireproof safe, and though she said she wouldn’t read them, she did. “ ‘Always together,’ ” Wanda quoted breathlessly, the first time she called to tell Jane she wasn’t meeting her quota of journal entries. “ ‘Never apart.’ That’s lovely. That’s mental anguish! We are going to destroy the jury with this.”