The only kind of grief work I want to do is the one where somebody stands on Brian Wilson’s head while I kick him in the face.
Brian! Did he call you too?
He still calls me every year — every year on the anniversary. I’m so sorry, Jane wrote. That sounds like torture.
It is torture. But don’t be sorry. Sorry’s not going to get any husbands back. Just be angry.
How long did you fight them?
Over Albert? Years and years. I’m still fighting. Even when it all comes to nothing. The lawyer quits, or disappears, or gets disappeared. The letters to the da’s office are never acknowledged, the phone calls never returned. Your Huffington Post article is subject to mysterious edits and redactions, and when you complain they all say the changes were your idea, and they show you the email you never sent asking for the changes. None of that works — the only hope now is direct attack. But I can’t get inside. None of us can. We’ve tried.
Inside? Others?
The rest of us. We’re not all inclined to just sit here and take it. So we’ve tried to get inside. Inside the pyramid. You know, to disable the dewars. Pull the plug. We’ve tried dressing as cleaning women, climbing in through vents, hijacking a drone, but none of it works. Polaris knows our names, our faces, our fingerprints. We’ve blown our own covers. The only people who get in the building are the employees and the members. The shepherds and the sheep.
The members go in? When they’re still alive?
Yes, those poor dumb beasts. The orientation ceremony is directly above the freezers. Can you imagine anything more disgusting?
Jane remembered a family-systems workshop Jim had attended two years before, in Orlando. It made her head hurt just to think about it. They invited me to be a member, she wrote. Sort of.
There was a long pause. Jane stared at the cursor.
They invited you?
Brian did. Basically.
There was another pause.
We have resources. We have details. We have a plan. All that’s left is a question.
What do you mean?
The question is: Are you angry enough to make this work?
Tell me what you mean? Make what work?
Are you angry enough? Do you really hate them? If you want to really get them, then we can help you do it. We can do it together. But you have to be angry enough at what they did to your husband. At what they did to your marriage. At what they did to all of us. Are you angry enough? Are you raging? Are you furious?
Jane tried out one answer: No, not really. I mean, probably almost, but when I think about it very calmly I understand that I’ll move on from this one day. Nobody can live a whole life obsessed with one stupid decision her husband made. Nobody can live their whole life in nightmare daydreams of chisels and frozen heads and… She stopped because the chatroom told her she had run out of characters, but she already knew she wasn’t going to send that.
And I can get Jim’s head back? Jane wrote, when she cleared the text box.
No, wrote Hecuba. But you can keep them from having it either.
Okay, Jane wrote, so acutely aware that she might just close her computer, and change her phone number, and try to forget the Penelopes, and Brian, and Polaris. Or just stop thinking about them. Okay, she wrote again, and she was writing it for the same reason she would have said it, if she and Hecuba66 had been having a face-to-face conversation sitting cross-legged on her bed, whispering together under a blanket — so she could have just one more moment to think, and then one more moment. Except that what she decided was that there wasn’t anything to 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.
1.12
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.