The room kept changing as well. The bed was a bed, but then it was a boat, and then an altar, and then a casket lined with puffy satin before it was a bed again. The walls of the room were shining white, and then for a while they might be some new color, unknown to him, but always complementary to Alice’s skin, before they became transparent or just disappeared — Jim was looking at them and then he was looking through them. But he paid closest attention to the action, at what his hands were doing and what his cock was doing — especially that. Sometimes he would slow down just to watch, and somebody would say, “Always together, never apart. Look at my face.”
Did you say something? Jim asked.
I did not speak, Alice replied. In this moment, her nose was a beak but her mouth was a plump orange flower. He was aware that fantastic vistas of space lay now beyond the transparent or nonexistent walls, the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, starfields as thick as snowfields, patches of deep darkness subtly colored with blue energy.
Over the headboard he could see new stars and planets winking into existence at the crest of a propagating wave of creation, and it took only a few thrusts of his pelvis to understand what was driving that wave. This was merely the confirmation of something he’d always suspected or maybe even seen before in some masturbating flight of his imagination, tiny couples fucking at the heart of a clockwork to drive its gears, or arranged in pairs of four, six, or eight to make the cars go, or pushing the flowers from out of their fuses.
I am fucking the world into existence! he cried.
Not exactly true, Alice said, though not in a way that at all embarrassed him or dulled his ardor. And not exactly false, either. But now is not the time to be explaining minor distinctions.
(Fuck)! Jim cried, and certainly it felt like a generative word. It felt like he was using it correctly for the first time, like saying Jesus! when you saw Him in a piece of blackened toast, or Oh my God! when a bush in your backyard happened spontaneously to burst into flame.
(Fuck)! he shouted again, and though he knew the future must be a perfect and perfectly happy place, he could not help but bring a little anguish into the world he was making. He said to himself, Don’t ruin this nice world by being anxious about absolutely nothing. But then he heard the echo of another voice saying again, “Look at my face,” and he understood the anguish was merely the herald of that ordinary face. Anguish drove his hips harder, and he was trying to make those ordinary features disappear, or trying to summon them permanently, or trying to push through the last soft black wall that kept his act of creation from propagating indefinitely, or he was just trying to come, and that last eternal bit of effort reminded him, as always, of how the space between two people was almost unbridgeable, since sometimes — maybe even the best times — you had to work so impossibly hard to close it.
He came, as he expected, with a big bang, and finally that ordinary face opened its gentle mouth to give a cry that seemed almost all grief, and surely the reason Jim was crying out “Jane! Jane! Jane!” in sadness was because he was dying again (though in reverse, which was not at all the same thing as being born) and someone must sing him back into the world with laments.
But when Alice spoke at last it was in tones of quiet joy. “Congratulations,” she said, a few moments or a million years later. “And welcome to the real word. Open your eyes now, and see it.”
1.5
Two days after Jim’s funeral, the mailman delivered a large triangular envelope to their house in Brooklyn. Jane studied the unopened envelope, which bore a Florida postmark and the Polaris logo at its peak, imagining it would contain a grotesque sympathy card, signed by everyone in the grotesque company and probably illustrated with some grotesque cartoon character — a penguin or a polar bear or an Eskimo or, most likely, a severed frozen Eskimo head that said, in a frosty word-balloon, In Eskimo we have 1,000 words for snow but only one word for the future or There was only one pair of footprints in the snow because the future was carrying me the whole time or the future is so sorry for your perceived loss.
But instead there was just a dvd in a blank sleeve, labeled on its face: d.o.v. — Polaris Member 10.77.89.1. The dvd was clipped to a glossy blue brochure, along with a note on a piece of Brian’s stationery (his official title was Senior Vice President for Family Relations), “I wanted you to have a little more information about us,” it said, in big looping fountain pen letters, “so I’m enclosing our prospectus along with your husband’s Documentation of Vitrification. Just in case you might be thinking of becoming a member.”
“The nerve of them!” she said to her mother. “Can you believe it? It’s such… it’s so…” Her mother watched her patiently while Jane tried to find the words to express the particular quality of outrage she was feeling. “It’s so rude,” she said at last, though that wasn’t sufficient at all. Her mother gave her a hug, which Jane tolerated, though she was getting very tired of people hugging her when she was angry — did people think of cobras as huggable in their flaring hoods, or porcupines as huggable in their coats of rigid spines? — as if anybody could be huggable in this habit of furious sadness she had never known existed until she had put it on. Her mother put the unread brochure into the recycling and the dvd in the trash, then made a show of washing her hands before she went back to planning dinner, fussing breezily over the menu before deciding to make chicken tonight and wait till tomorrow for the roast beef.
Jane came back for the brochure and the dvd late that night, after staring for an hour at her phone, lying in the dark reading all the news in the world she couldn’t care about, pausing intermittently to look at Brian’s number in her Recents — she wouldn’t do him the honor of making him an actual Contact — but resisting the compulsion to call and shout at him.
At the kitchen table, she set the dvd aside and studied the brochure’s cover, a photograph of the Polaris Pyramid, made entirely of glass. Surely that was the last thing they should make their headquarters out of, if Polaris really was trying to keep things cold in there, but of course if they were actually making soylent green out of their clients, then why not store them all in a giant greenhouse? When she’d glanced at the brochure cover earlier that day, the pyramid had registered as roughly the size of a house, but now she noticed that it utterly dwarfed the surrounding palm and oak trees. There weren’t any people in the picture, which seemed very strange. Shouldn’t they promote themselves like life-insurance companies, who always had pictures of happy old couples, or smiling, orphanable children on their brochures, pictures of hostages, really, since they weren’t so different from the pictures the Mafia might send you of your own family to say, Look at how happy and fragile they are! Hope nothing TERRIBLE happens to them! Except of course Polaris was selling a lie in the form of literal life insurance, and the person who bought that insurance might potentially give hardly a fuck at all for the people they left behind. Why, he might not even tell anyone what he’d done! Go ahead! said that person, whose head was always too warm for comfort, always too firmly attached to his body for his own satisfaction. Let them lose the house! Let them eat food stamps! I don’t care. I’m going to the future. I’m going to Oviedo!