The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  * * *

  To those who don’t know her well at all, Fiona is a dazzling cartoon mouse of a woman. Lithe and full-throated, perpetually bright-eyed and winging, she was impossible to miss, even at those times—and there were many—when she wanted nothing more than to be some icy and long-forgotten planet, rather than the gauzy, centric sun of every eager solar system she happened to flit through.

  I learned this and everything else about her that summer and in the three following years. We moved into an apartment together on the first of September—I know, I know, but we did—four days before my first day of law school. The place was, by any metric, stark and sunless, but it provided untold gallons of renewable fuel for Fiona’s acting machine; to her (she of the Great Midwest), it felt more like the Eastern Bloc than Brooklyn, a perspective that served to authenticate her entire artistic creaturehood. To me, the apartment brought to mind nothing more than striving, as of two young, squawking lovebirds barnstorming their way through life’s challenges, shitting on the windshields of all who dared to question their liberal arts degrees. We were twenty-two when it started.

  Becoming an adult is a funny thing in much the same sense that love is a funny thing, which is to say it usually isn’t very funny at all. One minute we had been relics—quaint and crumbling New English artifacts quite simply as quaint and crumbling as the Old Man of the Mountain himself—and the next we were the sudden babies of New York City, reeling from the torrential overload of a fresh, strange world. All at once, Fiona and I had gone from feeling the oldest we had ever felt to feeling the youngest we had ever felt, and even though we were right the first time there was a sense that everything we’d done and seen to that point had been somehow prenatal.

  The fear made us young, too: I was scared because I had acquired this whole array of adult skills—tandoori cooking, laundromat navigation, knowledge of gyms, relative expertise concerning the Buchanan presidency—but wasn’t sure how to convincingly make a complete life out of them, and Fiona was scared because I explained this to her in exactly that way.

  “What’s it all going to be like?” she asked me with typical moon-eyed wonder, not thirty seconds after we opened our new apartment’s thin door for the first time. The frame was splintered; the knob slumped loose from its mooring like a guilty dog.

  “The whole thing?”

  “Or any part. What will it be like for us?”

  “I don’t—I think we don’t get to know. I think it’s good that we don’t get to know.”

  “Yeah, but it’s easy for you to say that because you’re going to be a lawyer in three years. There are unknowns, but they’re completely adorable, like ‘what prestigious internship am I going to get,’ or ‘how well am I going to do on my torps exam?’”

  “Torts.”

  “Torps?”

  “It’s torts. You really thought—”

  “I thought it was short for torpitude. Like crimes that are morally…”

  “Turpitude.”

  “Right. Okay, yes—turpitude. That one I should’ve had. Look, obviously I don’t know what torps are, and I’m thrilled that you’ll be learning about them, but my point is that your anticipated line of work comes with a certain degree of job security that mine does not.”

  “Okay, well, absolutely, being a lawyer carries with it a lot less question marks than—”

  “Fewer!”

  “Nice. Yes. Fewer question marks, but the payoff of being an actress is a lot bigger.”

  “How?”

  “Well, for one thing, you’ll be famous.”

  “Ha!”

  “You will. You’re that good.”

  And she was, she really was that good.

  “Okay, but even a lot of phenomenally talented actors never break through,” she said wistfully, now lying perfectly still, face up, arms splayed, on the hardwood floor.

  “You will. I already know that you’ll become a star, Fiona. I know that with confidence. What are you doing? Are you making an apartment angel?”

  It was hard, then, although that was almost certainly the point of the experience. When law school started, I became predictably overwhelmed by this whole rich and terrible world of ideas and rules, what an old professor once called “those wise restraints that make men free.” I dug into the work; it suited something in me, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there in the first place. My decision to apply to law school had been spurred by the same allergy to suddenness that Fiona later charmed away; why halt my education abruptly when there were so many graduate schools out there to help soften the fall? I had no particular career ambitions, but was frightened of closing doors, and among my several options the least narrow (and therefore most attractive) was the law.

  The greatest thing I learned in law school was this, and here you’ll want to maybe take notes, because I still find this to be just horribly interesting: if you move onto someone else’s property, and if you can stay there long enough without being detected, under certain circumstances it will just become yours.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Fiona when she heard.

  “I’m not kidding. Trespass somewhere for enough time, and eventually you own it.”

  “That doesn’t sound right to me. How is that a thing?”

  “It’s called adverse possession. It’s been around since before America; it’s a well-established thing.”

  “Okay and what are the rules again?”

  “Actual, continuous, open, notorious, hostile, and exclusive possession for a statutory period of—”

  “English, counselor.”

  “Well, you need to actually be present on the property, uh, continually, for however long the period of—”

  “How long is that?”

  “It varies by state, but in New York it’s ten years.”

  “And if you run out of toilet paper or Sriracha…”

  “You can leave to go to the store. Continuous just means you can’t leave for a long time and then come back. You’d have to start the ten years all over again.”

  “Okay and what else?”

  “Open and notorious means you can’t actively hide from the owner or pretend you aren’t actually squatting there; you need to change the land somehow, which could be by building something, like a fence, or a house—”

  “A gazebo!”

  “… Yep. A gazebo would definitely count. You need to be there without permission: that’s hostile. The only other thing is exclusive. Exclusive means that the real owner can’t be there while you’re also there. Otherwise, you know.”

  “Chaos.”

  “Exactly.”

  Maybe she shouldn’t know that adverse possession exists, I found myself thinking. Maybe it’s too—

  “We’re doing it!”

  “We’re really not.”

  “Why would you tell me about this and think that we wouldn’t … of course we’re doing it!” she practically shouted, now pacing conspiratorially the short circuit of our almost comically small kitchen. “We’re gonna do it to a farm upstate somewhere.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, you can’t camp out in Brooklyn.”

  “Fair.”

  “We’re gonna do it to a cranberry farm!”

  “Is that a real thing?”

  “We’re gonna do it to … a regular farm!”

  “There might be cranberry farms. It was a sincere question,” I offered, and I still don’t know.

  “Or an apple orchard! I bet we’d be the greatest farmers, or orchard keepers. You could drop out of law school—”

  “Deal.”

  “And I wouldn’t ever have to go to another audition again. We could live off the land,” she said serenely, smushing her forehead onto mine for a long moment before clamping her lily teeth around my nose until I agreed to be a trespassing farmer.

  Having begrudgingly entered adulthood, we tried to become established quickly as something like naturalized citizens in our new home—and here is wh
ere adverse possession became for us a peculiar sort of manifest destiny, a watchword to chart our progress as takers of the world. Every restaurant we ate at twice instantly became Ours, and at every bar we intentionally ordered the same drinks over and over because we knew that we could build an easy home out of routine. When we discovered bookstores, we told everyone about them.

  “Adverse possession!” she would bellow proudly when we found something we wanted for our own.

  Fiona and I kept taking, kept living in this way, long after our friends had grown comfortably into their older, smaller lives. We claimed every experience for only ourselves: the first snow, the last rays of the day, every star we gazed was ripped from the public domain—property of Fiona and Leo’s New Life Together, copyright and patent pending and no squatters allowed. We were celestial thieves; we had no remorse; our only desire was the annexation of all beautiful things. We adversely possessed things we read about, things we’d never even seen. The phosphorescent pools out west. Some weathered stone walls near Galway. Slushy St. Petersburg. Brooklyn belongs to us now.

  We almost had the Northern Lights. I found out that if we rented a car, left in the morning, and drove fifteen hours due north we could take them for sure:

  “I will,” Fiona said.

  I know.

  “I’m serious, I really will,” she said.

  I will too.

  We fought and loved like I imagined the great couples of history fought and loved. In our worst moments, we whiled away the time the way some people dice onions: every move a tiny violent severance, every new layer reached another baffling chemical reason to dam up your eyes, each action so crisp and so careless that someone is inevitably bound to draw blood. In our best moments, we were mad for one another, fully pooled in each other’s ideas and aspirations.

  She told me once, between sibilant smacks of an apple, that she could read my thoughts, and I believed that it was true.

  “It’s good that no one is like you,” she told me.

  I loved every small thing there was about Fiona. That she was a bawdy drunk. That she always, always talked to people as though they could easily intuit cardinal directions (“you’re going to want to head south at the light, ma’am”). The way she said “Leo,” so precisely, every time, as though a rougher enunciation might bruise the word. The way she was warm to no one but me.

  I never loved Fiona so much as I did then, in those first awe-filled days, because she kept me from having to be born again, alone. And when we struggled, we did so secure in the knowledge that this was happening everywhere, and to people just like us, that it had happened before and would continue to happen so long as there was college and currency and wine.

  * * *

  Probably the most important thing to know about me is that I am a fraud. When I was in second grade, Mrs. Easterling gave us a spelling test, and because I was good at spelling I finished it early. We had to sit quietly until everybody finished, though, so while I waited I decided to doodle on the back of the paper: three-dimensional boxes, those cool letter esses that look like gothic figure eights, and a small diagram explaining, with a drunkard’s penmanship but accurately enough, the basic premises of the Pythagorean theorem. I must have seen it in one of my brother’s encyclopedias; I used to sneak into his room at night when I couldn’t sleep and read them on the floor by flashlight. We can’t know why—I was voracious for worldly knowledge back then, in the way that today I am voracious only for free food.

  Teachers, parents: all agreed that my scrawlings had been the unmistakable first gurgles of genius. Within a week I was whisked off to fifth-grade math classes, special little tutor sessions, advanced everything; by the time I was twelve I was essentially in high school, this wunderkind, head down, excelling. Every step forward looked impressive enough on its own to make the next a foregone conclusion, regardless of merit or work ethic or interest, and I can trace that Rube Goldberg device straight from law school all the way back to the moment when I pointlessly regurgitated a little Greek doorstop onto the back of my spelling test in colored pencil.

  Mrs. Easterling thought I was the future, but really I was only peaking young. I never cured cancer or split the atom or changed the way anyone thought about anything. I never even wanted to. Rockets were the future, once, and so were drive-in movies, and Lenny Bias, and the Edsel, and Betamax. Bayonets, CD-Roms, Communism. The United States of America. Things get away from you. They get away from you, and it happens so quickly, and all that promise grows obsolete.

  Fiona, who was smarter and more curious by nature than I would ever be, never much minded that my super-genius days were long behind me. She didn’t much care that I talked in my sleep—she secretly recorded it, in fact, for several weeks, and laid my subliminal maunderings onto a trembling and frankly regrettable “post-dubstep” (?) beat during the fondly-remembered Month She Decided to Be a DJ. She weathered my brimming catalog of neuroses, my soy allergy, the way I cock my head like a terrier when I get judgmental or confused. My hypochondria.

  O, my hypochondria: on occasion, almost totally debilitating (or is it, right?), lacking all regard for my otherwise quite adequate capacity for basic reason. An abridged survey of the ailments and decrepitudes with which I have honestly and wrongfully believed myself to have been stricken over the years would include bone cancer, kidney cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, about a thousand brain tumors, calcium deficiencies, young adult arthritis, chronic heart attack, various ulcers, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, pneumonia, acid reflux, both types of diabetes, a torn anterior cruciate ligament, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, scabies, migraines, carpal tunnel syndrome, anemia, gout, dormant epilepsy, hyper- and hypoglycemia, SARS, osteoporosis, restless legs syndrome, extremely-early-onset Alzheimer’s, generalized anxiety disorder, very specific anxiety disorder, and—I kid you not—the avian flu.

  Quoth Fiona: “You do not have that.” But in the moment—amid the news reports, the breathless speculations, the hurt bird I saw that morning on the steps of the law library—in the moment, I did have that.

  Fiona had none of those things, and until her wisdom teeth were removed on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday she had never been a patient in a hospital. She came from Lutheran stock, and her people were hale and hardy, the starch of the human species: vigorous and lusty and all other adjectives more at home describing a gale or a stew than persons. They say “belly” instead of stomach, and even their littlest (see: five-four Fiona) seem large, their aspects puffed up and out by their own magnetism, like folk heroes.

  Perhaps it was that indomitable blood that made her so steady on a stage. Acting came as naturally to Fiona as nothing came to me; she’d wanted to be a movie star since she was eight years old and her older brother let her watch Sigourney Weaver in Alien while their parents were away, and it is a rare thing that a child’s singular fantasy of adulthood conspires so effortlessly to suit her when the moment comes to choose what she might be.

  I wasn’t imaginative enough to harbor that kind of desire. When I was little, the concept of movie stardom didn’t make a lick of sense to me; I’d see Tom Hanks and be outraged: I know you’re not an astronaut, because I just saw you fight that volcano. It’s the same person! Always the same person, just pretending to be a cop or a baseball manager or an adult kid. If the movie people really wanted us to become engrossed in their stories, why wouldn’t they cast entirely new actors for each one? At least then I could imagine that you are who you say that you are. Why should I participate in the universal hallucination of agreeing that you’re William Wallace? You’re blatantly Mel Gibson, and I see you on television all the fucking time. I don’t know when in life I finally caved to the world on this point, but I’m glad that I permanently succumbed to the charade in time to enjoy watching Fiona over and over again. I’m glad.

  She worked consistently during Our First Year—in nearly credible black-box art pieces, mostly, and once in a national commercial for auto insurance alongside multip
le computer-generated co-stars of the animalic variety, co-stars whose heavy accents bore no relationship whatsoever to the natural habitats of their respective genera.

  Even in lesser fare, she cut a brilliant ingénue or fender bender-er, conveying with the merest morsel of a look whichever ineffable feeling was required. Fiona was blessed with easy access to the full bright constellation of human emotions. She was wasted on the too-clever playwrights of New York, wasted on the horn-rimmed directors, wasted on her peers, those parched minds packed unstably into beautiful bodies. I never liked any of her acting friends—not one. Mackenzie Walters, loudmouthed and positively Amazonian, whom Fiona had met at an arts camp in seventh grade. Alice Gerson, a sweet but shivering bundle of unearned insecurities with whom Fiona frequently competed for parts. Joel Enson, Mackenzie’s even-louder-mouthed boyfriend who never once came to our apartment without cooking something elaborate out of our freshest ingredients that clearly didn’t belong to him. The parade of smirking autolatrists from Fiona’s acting class, boring men and boring women, each of whom had long ago convinced themselves that it was their intricate talent alone which daily attuned the spheres of Heaven and Earth.

  Fiona wasn’t one of them—she had character of the sort for which you cannot simply substitute in hair product—but it made me nervous that these were her friends. I found myself eyeing her for residue every time they came around, the way you might check your partner for ticks after hiking through a stretch of long grass. Could they infect my complicated darling with their swooning idiocy? Is lack of depth contagious? Of course not, I decided each night, as she curled herself once more onto my arm. She writes notes in the margins of poetry books in pencil; she listens to people when they speak.