Who are you? Jim asked. Where am I? Why can’t I see you?
There are short answers and long answers to all those questions. Which would you prefer to hear? There is time for either or both.
Let’s start with the short ones.
I am your (social worker). You are at (Polaris). And you are not trying hard enough to see me.
(Social worker)? Jim asked.
Yes. It is a word you know, but it does not entirely suit the present context. Hence (social worker).
(Polaris)? You mean, it worked?
Of course.
It really worked? I’m really alive?
You have always been alive.
He thought to himself, I am alive!, very subtly aware, in this new state of being, how thinking to himself was different from (speaking). Alive in the future! How about that? He waited some period of time — it was hard to tell if it was a minute or a month — to feel excited or exultant, but the notion of life remained only merely supremely interesting.
But am I all here? I don’t feel entirely like myself. Or am I on some kind of drug, maybe a tranquilizer? Because I’m in the hospital?
You are not on drugs. Neither are you in a hospital. But you are here and not here. Right now, you are only the leaven of your connectome.
My what?
Your connectome. The totality of your neurological connections. Your quantum self.
I don’t think I understand.
Of course you don’t. We are getting ahead of ourselves.
I see. He paused another (moment). And why can’t I see anything? Did you tell me that I’m not trying hard enough to see you?
I did tell you that. But I should have said not trying at all. There is a short and a long solution to that problem. Would you like the short solution first?
Yes, please.
The short solution is try harder.
Try harder? Like to wake up?
You were never asleep. You won’t fully understand until you make your (Debut).
My (Debut)? Like cotillion? Or like on Broadway?
It is the culmination of the third and final cycle by which the leaven of your connectome expands to inhabit every space of your personality within a new body, learns and forgets what it must know and cannot know to live in the future, and joins with us in fellowship. The sequence is thus: (Incarnation); (Examination); (Debut).
I don’t understand!
Yes. There you go again.
Getting ahead of ourselves?
Indeed. You should ignore everything but the one thing. Do you remember what that one thing is?
Trying harder? To see you?
Yes, exactly.
Jim noted the absence of eyelids to shut tight, or hands to squeeze into fists, or buttocks and a jaw to clench — everything he was accustomed to doing when he was really trying at something. Instead, he tried to muster their interior equivalents, opening a door in his mind onto scenes of struggle: squats and jerks and lifting a corner of the refrigerator, and arguments with the head of the hospital about funding for the Clinical Pastoral Education program, all times when he was full to bursting with what he wanted. And yet all of these interior equivalents felt, as he deployed them, like they were not enough. He tried another sort of effort — it felt like what he did when he was praying as hard as he could, which he had once described to a nonhumanist chaplain who had expressed doubt that somebody who didn’t believe in God could pray, as an effort like internal pooping. That was better, divorced, as it was, from physical effort, which was clearly the wrong thing to bring to bear on this situation. But now, instead of having a general sense of being suspended in darkness that was neither warm nor cold but without any temperature at all, Jim was falling.
Falling became an occasion for panic, but it also offered him a first lesson in how he must proceed. He wished he had taken a little more time just to chat with his (social worker), since it was clear to him that he was failing now because he was trying, falling only because he had conceived of the space through which he could fall. He thought of a rope, and there it was, at once an idea and a mental object. The rope wasn’t enough to stop him falling — he slipped from knot to knot to knot. But now he had shown himself the distance between try and do, and offered himself a solution: if he wanted to see her, he must conceive of her. Except what he really meant was (conceive), since what seemed clearly called for was a different kind of thinking and conceiving, a different kind of mental effort, than he was used to, some kind never needed before by anybody and so at the very least unused throughout the history of man, if not actually uncreated. And if this was the short solution to his problem, Jim was suddenly afraid of finding out what the long one might be.
But then, (grasping) the last knot on his rope, there came a flash of light. It was exactly the sort of light that explodes in your interior perception when you stand up into an open cabinet and smack your head, or someone punches you in the eyeball. He pulled himself up, quickly exhausting not just the rope, but the very idea of pulling. He (moved) into notions of pushing and twisting and thrusting, and from there to notion-motions for which he had no name except (dance): tense, generative gestures that seemed to create not just the space but the sheltering dimensions through which he traveled. And each gesture was part of a loud, conscious fuss over enormous concepts: NO I don’t want to die and YES let me see your face, let me see your body and my body, and LET ME SEE THIS NEW WORLD! There was color in the light, and then the light and color bled profusely, establishing and populating Jim’s whole field of vision.
He was outside, on a farm. There was the house, and the barn, and the silo, and the big blue bowl of sky with clouds in the shape of elephants and castles and whales. What a beautiful world! And there was his new friend — he thought she looked beautiful before he thought she looked strange — sitting patiently above him at the center of a silvery web, waving four arms and blinking at him with very tiny but truly luminous blue eyes.
Greetings and salutations! she said.
1.3
Jane’s reverend mother presided over Jim’s funeral, which was not at all the service he had asked for. Jane barely had attention for any of the details, but she was peripherally aware of her mother shouting at Jim’s friends when they called to complain. Jim had wanted a pagan Viking service, complete with basso chanting and a flammable boat set alight with a fire arrow as it drifted away from the mourners. Instead of that, her mother had arranged a Unitarian Universalist service heavily inflected with her native Congregational elements, though Jane’s mother said over and over to Jim’s friends that she would keep mention of Jesus to a minimum. Once Jane talked briefly with Dick — he called just as she picked up the phone to continue her assault on Polaris Cryonics Incorporated. “We all promised him,” Dick had said. “You promised him it would be a certain way, and now you are breaking your promise.”