“I like that one,” Jim said to Franklin, the next to last person he visited. “Because it seems respectful to them, you know. To the people and the memories. Like, that extraordinary attention is a way of acknowledging how much they’re worth to you. I can’t believe I’m saying this.”
“But I know just what you mean. And I understand. You have to be good to them, somehow. You have to be trying really hard to represent them. Because they’re worth it, of course. But also, if you didn’t try hard enough, there might be something… left over. Which can be very bad for you.”
“An explosion, right? Alice said something about that.” Franklin nodded without looking up from his drawing. He had Jim working on a drawing of his own. “You’re the best at teaching this, you know. By far.”
“Only because I had a hard time with it too, in the beginning. Who wouldn’t?” He had given Jim a large pad of newsprint and a piece of charcoal, then showed him how to draw a circle from the shoulder, and said he should draw a thousand of them before lunch. “I came to drawing by watching another client breaking horses,” Franklin said. “Noticing how those muscles contain the uncontainable. And what I saw her doing with them was just… a recognition, you know? She was going after a feeling — what a wild life she must have had, to need those beasts to represent it! She was putting her feelings about her old life into those horses, and breaking her feelings. You break enough feelings and you’re new again. Right?”
“But then you have to live without feelings?”
“Don’t be silly,” Franklin said. “Then you’ve got room for new feelings. About new things. In a new life. Then you’re ready for your Debut.” He stepped back from his drawing, a young girl with dark eyes and long hair parted in the middle. “Anyway. You picked a good time to visit my studio. This one’s almost done.”
“She’s lovely,” Jim said. “Very lifelike. Did you draw in your other life?”
Franklin shrugged. “I don’t remember,” he said, winking. “Not anymore.” He took the drawing up in his hands. “It’s my cousin Sylvia. I mean it’s her, and it’s how I feel about her. She wasn’t actually so special. Some people save the hardest goodbyes for last, but I’m just dealing with outliers at this point. Ready?”
“Sure,” Jim said. He put down his charcoal.
“So, like I said: Step one, illustration and integration.” He waved the picture. “Step two, consideration, recognition.” He gave it a long hard look. Then he shouted, “Step three!” and tore the lovely picture in half again and again. When the pieces were too small to rip all together he worried them individually with his teeth, and growled over them. By the time he was done, the pieces were everywhere on the floor and Jim was backed up against a wall. “You know,” Franklin said, when he’d caught his breath, “I think I’m about ready for my masterpiece.” He was smiling and his lips were as black as a dog’s.
“What’s that?” Jim asked. “Who’s it going to be?”
“Oh, just some dude,” Franklin said. “Now it’s your turn.” He stood over Jim’s shoulder while Jim finished the cat, and he really was a good teacher, asking Jim all the right questions to help him remember how the cat looked, and to put names to the feelings the cat evoked. Jim managed to draw something much prettier and lifelike (and therefore more representative and cleansing, Franklin said) than the stick figure he would have done on his own. There you are, Jim said to it. You were a good cat. We had some good times together, I’m sure. But now I’m going someplace where pets are not allowed.
“Now hold the name in your mind,” Franklin said, “and tear that fucker to shreds.” Jim did as he was told. He sang the name in his head—Feathers! — and tore the picture to shreds. “There you go,” Franklin said. “Now isn’t that better?”
“Maybe,” Jim said. “But I still remember the cat — even better than before, actually. Now I can see it.”
“Well, sure,” Franklin replied, a little crossly. “You still need to find your own way. That’s why I’m not a horse trainer. Only you can truly free yourself from the bondage of the past.”
“Yeah, that Frank is intense!” Sondra said. Jim went to see her when he was done with Franklin. Her studio was actually the whole garden. She gave him a hand-weeder. “But it’s hard, obviously. Figuring out your new job. I’m a lot more mellow than Frank, you can probably tell.”
A lot more sad, anyway, Jim wanted to say. That was the sort of bold conversational risk he used to take routinely as a chaplain, but it didn’t seem appropriate here — he was supposed to be learning from these people, not trying to counsel them. Still, in a professional way, his heart went out to her. “Too bad they don’t need any humanist atheist chaplains in the future,” he said. “I know how to do that.” She took him to a row of carrots, where they knelt together and began to weed.
“Or hairdressers,” she said.
“Oh, is that what you did?”
“We owned a few salons,” she said. “Well, scads and scads of salons, actually. You don’t buy a ticket to the future with tips!”
“I suppose we shouldn’t be talking about this,” Jim said. “Our old jobs in our old lives. You should tell me about the work you’re doing right here and now.”
“Sure,” Sondra said. “But fuck it. Why don’t you meet me later in my room? I’ll make you look like Sandy Duncan and you can pray for my soul.”
“I don’t believe in souls,” Jim said.
“Ha! Then you can pray for my connectome.”
“You can style my connectome,” said Jim. Sondra slapped her thigh with her little shovel and laughed. When he’d gotten every weed within reach, he started to make the soil neat and flat around the tender little carrot tops. “So tell me about your method.”
“Well,” she said. “It’s simple, really. Which is what makes it so beautiful. I treat each plant like a memory. Or I treat each memory like a plant. Anyhow, I bury them in the earth. End of story.”
“I see,” Jim said. “And what about the feelings that go with the memories?” They moved down the garden row and knelt again.
“Bury them, too,” she said. “They’re, like, the fertilizer.”
“I see. But what happens when the plants come up? What’s the part that breaks the memory? What’s the part that makes it go away?”
“Fuck if I know!” Sondra said. She sat back on her heels, took off her hat, and hit him with it. “Haha!” she said, smiling, but he thought she looked panicked around her eyes. “I’m just gardening because I like it, actually. There’s no fancy plan.”
“Oh,” Jim said. “That’s… allowed?”
“I suppose it must be. Nobody’s given me any shit yet. I’ll come up with something. What’s the hurry?” She moved closer to him until their hips were touching. Then they weeded awhile in silence, until she said she had psyched herself up enough to plant some parsnips. She insisted on spitting the seeds into the little holes, so Jim did that too, and he stayed with her until the air started to cool and the sun was going down. He liked the dirt on his hands, and the pressure of Sondra’s shoulder and hip against his own, and he liked not thinking, for a little while, about who or what or whether he was going to forget. Which was probably why she asked, after another long spell of quiet, “Are you like me?”