“It’s just our vows,” Jane said. “What we promised. The promise he broke.”
“You mean what they took away,” Wanda said. “What they did. I’m not saying they murdered your marriage but it’s almost that bad. It’s negligent marriage homicide. It’s heartslaughter. So this is great, honey. You’re doing great. We just need more, more more!”
Her husband added that they needed mountains of hard subjective data that would overwhelm the judge and jury, leaving them no choice but to find in Jane’s favor. To that end he gave Jane a button she was supposed to push at any time of the day or night when she felt mental hardship on account of Polaris taking Jim’s head away and freezing it and refusing to give it back to her. The button talked to a base station in the foyer, which talked through the phone lines to a computer in Flanagan’s office, which kept an endless virtual ticker tape of data points like a heart monitor. At first Jane just held it down rigidly for hours at a time, which prompted a call from Wanda to say she was confusing the computer. She praised Jane for recording her constant mental anguish, and recommended that Jane instead just push the button as fast as she could. Jane called back when both her thumbs were exhausted and sore. Flanagan got on the phone to say a repetitive motion injury would only help their case.
Almost three weeks after their first meeting, just as Jane was thinking seriously about going back to work, and trying to figure out where to keep a mental-anguish receiver at the hospital so it would be in range of the button, Flanagan asked to meet again. “I’m onto something,” he told her, “but I think we should talk about it face to face.” She could feel him winking through the phone. “It’s big. It’s enough to make you push the other button. The good button, if you know what I mean.”
“The happy button?”
“The ‘we’re going to win’ button,” he said. “Sleep well tonight. And don’t talk to whatshisface!” He ended all their conversations that way, though Jane didn’t need to be reminded not to call Brian after Flanagan had told her even one more word to him might compromise their case. Brian — or some Polaris autobot — texted every morning, but she never replied, and she never answered her phone, or listened to the messages, when Brian called every evening just after dinnertime.
Wanda’s diary website was down when Jane went to make an entry before bed, and it was still down when she woke up. The mental-anguish receiver was beeping sharply, at three-minute intervals, like a smoke detector asking for new batteries, but it was plugged firmly into the wall. Even the button itself somehow felt less springy.
When Jane arrived at the strip mall, Flanagan’s office was empty, not just of people but of every bit of furniture. She walked outside and stood by the door, making sure of where she was — same dollar store, same threading salon, but now the office was just a blank window. She went inside the salon and asked what happened to Mr. Flanagan. The proprietress raised a hand to her face and blew quickly and harshly across her open palm. “He blew away?” Jane asked, but the lady just shrugged. Jane went back to the office and stood in the empty waiting room, calling every number she had for Mr. Flanagan. None of them were in service. Then she called Brian, who had sent her his customary text that morning: We are all always thinking of you here at Polaris.
“What did you do?” she asked as soon as he picked up. “What did you do?”
“Dr. Cotton,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“You bastard,” she said. “What did you people do to my lawyer?”
“We didn’t do anything. Dr. Cotton, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did something happen to Mr. Flanagan?”
She held a pose for moment, one she struck a few times a year at the hospital, holding the phone against her chest with one hand while the other pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to contain herself, but nonetheless she shrieked her reply. “If you didn’t do anything, then how do you know his name?” Then she threw her phone across the office, and when it wasn’t broken yet, when Brian’s teddy bear voice was still mumbling sympathetically into the appalling emptiness of the rooms, she threw it again, and then one more time, until it shattered.
1.10
The morning after his birthday party, Jim showed up early at Alice’s door, ready to learn how to evoke, contain, and forget the memories that were keeping him from starting his new life in the future. He planned on starting small — maybe with Feathers the cat.
“You must free yourself in your own way,” Alice said gently, when Jim made it clear to her that he thought they were supposed to have a lesson that morning. “They are your memories. It was your life. It will be your new life that begins when you are ready. So it must be your work — your art — that holds and abolishes the memories in your way.”
“But I don’t understand,” Jim said.
“Yes, you do,” she said, and closed her door — gently but firmly — in his face. When he knocked again she didn’t open it, but called out that he might go see how the other clients did their work, instead of asking her questions she couldn’t answer for him.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Jim asked, and Alice answered through the door that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He found each of his housemates hard at work in one way or another, and all of them were polite if not quite helpful to him. It wasn’t long before he started to feel like he had going up and down in the hospital when he visited patients as a chaplain, a not-quite-welcome visitor who asked quiet questions about people’s processes. There’s one, he thought to himself, considering the memory, the hospital smell and the noise of his shoes on the linoleum, and the way the sanitizing hand gel felt when he squirted his hands before he knocked on a door. But he didn’t do anything with that memory but put it aside, which was not at all the same as forgetting it.
He went to see Brenda in her pottery studio (where, she told him, she was throwing vessels that would not just contain but be the memories of her old life — she fired and glazed the vessels with great care, only to smash them against the wall as soon as they had cooled) and Blanket in her salon de danse, where she said she was choreographing her lived experience of the old world (her memories were contained in still poses and then destroyed in violent leaps and rolls and kicks). Jim visited Eagle among a mess of little wooden Jenga pieces, which she painstakingly assembled into tall arches held together by gravity alone and meant to perfectly represent one episode from her old life; when the arch collapsed, the memory troubled her no more. Folly appeared to be training plump black ants to battle one another to the death inside a neatly raked Zen sandpit (she wouldn’t speak to Jim, but by her gestures she made it clear enough that they somehow were managing to cancel her memories out), and Ahh! with whom he spent barely any time, appeared to be very intently masturbating, her led hair changing color in a panting cadence in her shadowed room. She took absolutely no notice of him, but he imagined she might be pursuing a perfectly representative and destructive orgasm.