The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  “Oh, Lenny! This is fate—it’s kismet, your mother would say. We can help each other. Have you met Lita? My mother, Lita? No, you probably haven’t, have you—not since you were a little boy. She is eighty-eight years old, but Lenny, she is very much alive, very active, a very sharp lady is my mother. Anyway, she lives there now—she got sick of Florida and she wanted to be close to her daughters and her granddaughters, so she just moved into one of the bedrooms in my place. She doesn’t need anybody taking care of her, Lenny, and even if she did that wouldn’t be a job for you, and anyway my sisters are all close by. So, no, I will not accept any money from you, mi querido—but Lita, my mother, she could use some help with one thing only. She has a dog.”

  I moved into Luz’s penthouse the next week, and sublet my squalid Brooklyn digs to a high school friend of Sona’s. My new place was well-kept and womby, and Luz had left no fewer than thirty-five post-it notes clinging to various surfaces and appliances instructing me on everything from towel basics to the creation of ice cubes. A family of six could have lived there comfortably—luxuriously, even—but kismet insisted that the unlikely trio of Lita, the dog, and I suffice.

  I actually met the dog before I met Lita: a middle-aged miniature schnauzer named Rafael Uribe Uribe, after the famous Colombian politician and general. He was coy and defensive, with the ragged beard of a graying billy goat and the fusty odor of another, much deader billy goat. The hircine pooch was endowed with a boundless supply of nervous energy; it was clear to me from the outset that he was riddled with the full compendium of dog anxieties, and all day long his skittish paw-nails tapped out their endless retreats on the hardwood floor. Lita was out when I first came in, so my introduction to Rafael was thus: peaceable palms and human words of calm on the one hand, feverish barking and a botched, near-cartoonish scampering away on the other. Could he smell my sadness? I couldn’t know. In time we would be friends.

  Lita had a majestic little thatch of chromic hair, and a face warmed and thickened by many hot suns. She was sweet, wise, and humble, the very picture of grandmaternity. At least that’s what I imagined she was like—for all I knew, she could have been gently flinging curse words at me from behind those kind old earthen eyes. As it happened, she did not appear to speak a single word of English, and my Spanish was likewise limited to an unhelpful handful of clunky, phonetic greetings. For reasons now obscure to me, I’d chosen to take French in school, the result of which was this initial exchange on Lita’s return from her morning walk that first day:

  Me, unloading cooking supplies from a duffel bag: “Oh! Hi! You must be Lita. Luz—your daughter, she … she must have told you I’d be moving in today. Right?”

  Lita, smiling indifferently: “Hola. Sí, sí.”

  Me, thinking perhaps that she understood: “Oh, great. It’s wonderful to meet you—or, I guess, we met a long time ago, when I was very young. I’m Leo. Lenny? Do you … uh, we met, I think, once before, when I was very … poquito.”

  Lita, creaking downward to rest one ancient, tremulous hand upon the head of Rafael Uribe Uribe: “Sí, sí. Hola, mi perro hermoso. Tranquilo, mi pequeño amor. Tienes hambre, mi dulce?”

  Me, beginning to appreciate the situation: “Oh. I don’t … this is going to be funny, because I don’t actually … speak any Spanish at all. This is going to be difficult, huh?! Heh. Very … diff … i … cile. No habla español, I’m afraid. De nada.”

  Lita, still whispering only to the dog: “Desayunamos, Rafi. Ven conmigo, mi amor.”

  And she shuffled away with another far off smile, her cantering dog in tow.

  FIVE

  MITHRIDATES VI BECAME THE RULER OF ARMENIA Minor when his father, Mithridates V, was assassinated one hundred and twenty years before the birth of Christ. The son was only fourteen at the time, a boy king, and for nearly six decades he bedeviled the Roman Empire from his Turkish perch. Deeply and understandably paranoid regarding assassinations, Mithridates the younger began his reign by decamping to the wilderness for seven years—the story goes that the duration of this period was spent gathering and consuming an unholy sampler comprised of every poisonous bit of flora yet known upon the Earth.

  Scholars and poets have sung the praises of his antidote, of Antidotum Mithridaticum, for more than two millennia. You start with a scintilla, and the venom hardly hurts you. You build from there, quite slowly, and the more you ingest the stronger your resistance becomes. As things move along, you become sick, but not deadly so. Your resistance blooms into a tolerance, which in turn blooms into full immunity; as with anything, you eventually become indifferent to the awful thing with which you’ve filled yourself.

  The vaccinated king came back to civilization in the wake of his ordeal, ruling and being and waging battles unafraid of sly conspirators. He gave his name to the Mithridatic Wars: great skirmishes with the greatest generals of the old Roman Republic—Lucullus, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and the last of these was Pompey. Mithridates was a graying caudillo by the time Pompey reached the heart of his kingdom; faced with capture and the imminent loss of his realm, he opted to kill himself rather than endure the torture of defeat. Frantically, he partook of every morsel of poison he could find. He was foiled, of course, by his own juvenilia: the defenses he so deliberately cultivated as a young man kept him from dying in the moment he finally wanted all that arsenic, all that wolfsbane, all that snakeroot and sumac, all that jimson and jequirity, that columbine, that corn cockle, that foxglove, larkspur, nightshade, that hellebore and hemlock to take root. He was required to keep living.

  It was early November, and despite my failure to overcome the things I had been feeling, I too was required to keep living. There were markers resembling progress, of course: my friends no longer had to actively watch out for me, and the feeling among them—among myself, too—was that my stark sadness had receded from the existentially dangerous to the merely pitiful. By then, I’d gone so far as to let Boots set me up on a series of whiskey-dates with righteous young women he knew from his past life in the music scene; though none of them ultimately stuck, several dug my downcast mind enough to linger for a few nonconsecutive days. They took shifts helping vainly to prop up the rusted little shanty of my love: Carina, the singer, who wished only to live each hour of each day rapt with the ceaseless wonder of the universe (terms to be defined later); Kait, formerly a ticket-girl at The Broken Promise Rhythm & Blues Club, who could pickle almost anything and who signed her e-mails “with metta, k”; Marissa, the bassist-turned-PhD-candidate, who told fascinating stories at a high and hearty level; Courtney, another bassist, who mostly wanted to fight about which of us had been more profoundly screwed up by their ex, and who left when I won. Nobody wasn’t sweet in their way—it was I who failed each time to see them, in a future tense, as something meatier than Anonymous Woman #7 in the end credits of my life: a bastard way to conduct one’s conduct.

  Every Saturday since mid-September, when my slow reemergence into civilized society had commenced, Boots, Emily, Sona, and I would cook dinner together at one of our apartments—a tradition that began, I discovered later, as just one stratagem among many that comprised the intricate suicide watch program my dear friends had created (unnecessarily, as it turned out) on my behalf. We’d talk about our lives, by which I mean our jobs, because, in the wild, the latter almost immediately devours the former. After the bar exam, Gracie had moved down to Washington to work for a senator—she sent along regular dispatches of the special madness rooting around in that place. Because Emily was the only one of us who had waded into a law firm, with its requisite long hours and deadening routines, we listened sympathetically to her prim disapproval of colleagues and senior partners. Sona had begun clerking for a famous judge in Manhattan back in September; her stories were more gripping even than those Boots and I—real-life death-row advocates, mind you—brought to the table each week.

  “So Tatum,” Sona divulged of her illustrious boss one November evening, “he has this thing where he gives a
ll the clerks new nicknames, almost every morning, based around a common theme. Like, we’ll go in, and he’ll say, ‘Good morning, Socrates’, to me, and Javon will be Aristotle, and Sammy will be Plato, and that’s what he’ll call us for the day. So, on Thursday, Javon was Mickey Mantle, Sammy was Yogi Berra, and I was Joe DiMagglio—”

  “DiMaggio,” corrected Boots.

  “Right—DiMaggio. Whatever. So all day Thursday, that’s what we are—‘Where are we on the summary judgment denial, Mick?’ ‘Yogi, can you red-line the defense brief?’ ‘DiMagglio, I need you to—”

  “DiMaggio. There is no ‘L’ anywhere in his name. His name is Joe DiMaggio. How is it possible you don’t know that?” Boots inquired.

  “Might have something to do with being born in Armenia, jackass,” Sona replied. “Now stop being racist and listen. Yesterday, I get to work, and both Javon and Sammy are out sick, so it’s just me and Tatum in his wing of the courthouse. And I say, just trying to defuse that being-alone awkwardness, ‘How are you going to pick a name for me if I’m the only one here today?’ You know, ’cause it’s always in threes. And he thinks for a second, and gets this just fantastically creepy look on his face, and sort of eyes me up and down, and says, ‘Maybe you should be Marilyn Monroe, and I should be Joe DiMagglio.’”

  “DiMaggio,” said Boots.

  “Isn’t that wild?” asked Sona, notably more intrigued than disgusted.

  “What’s wild,” nagged Boots, “is that you understand the context of why that’s a creepy reference, but still somehow don’t know the guy’s name. How is that possible?”

  “What I think’s wild is that you’re being sexually harassed at work,” added Emily.

  “By a famous person, too,” I offered.

  “Yes, by a famous person,” confirmed Emily. “But, for the record, I think my wild thing is sort of the headline here. It’d be great if we could stay focused on that for a second. He was really hitting on you?”

  “Hard to say,” answered Sona. “But … yes. He definitely was. I’m pretty sure he’s a huge pervert, too. I hear things. I see things. I mean, the man has been married four times, and—I did the math on this—those four wives were a combined seventy-one years younger than him. Seventy-one years! And his first wife was his age. So that’s a red flag right there, right? Also: I heard from the woman who does our IT that he has, let’s say, very particular tastes when it comes to his Google searches. No joke. ‘Young women nude fireplace hearth animal skin rug.’ That’s verbatim, too—who the hell is into hearth porn? Who uses the word ‘hearth’? It’s crazy, right? ‘Young women nude safari jungle cat.’ I don’t know what that means, but: gross. I’m just gonna ride this one out, though, see how much dirt I can get on him in case I need it later.”

  “Jesus,” I said, slowly peeling the damp label off of my beer.

  “And how are things down at the hippie store?” she asked with a demonic grin.

  “Uh, I think we still like it,” I responded half-heartedly, and looked to Boots for a second opinion.

  “It’s as good as a job can be, I guess,” he said ruefully, staring off and away. “Of course, I hate all jobs, so there’s that.”

  “You do not hate all jobs,” countered Emily.

  “Jobs like this, I do. Jobs where you have to go in every day, and wear an arbitrary tie. I don’t care how excellent the people are—I’ll never stop seeing every office as a kind of prison.”

  “Well. That’s not juvenile or anything,” scoffed Sona.

  “The people actually are fairly excellent, I’d say,” I said, again attempting to speak the language of the well-adjusted. “You really couldn’t ask for better bosses than Martha and Peter.”

  “I heartily concur with that part,” conceded Boots. “But still.”

  As always happened, unfailingly, this conversation of ours ultimately seemed to coil, and then tighten, around the subject of my emotional health. Talk of work begat talk of life begat the game where everyone who is maybe interested in self-harm raises their hand.

  “Are you still writing imaginary letters to that stupid hussy?” posed Sona as the night drew on. “What was her name again?”

  “Fee-o-na,” I intoned. “And no. I’ve stopped all that.” This was less than true.

  “You know, I never did like her,” she went on.

  “Yes you did. All of you loved her, and so did I.”

  “Not one bit, Mr. Brice. Not one bit. I don’t remember that at all.”

  She smiled broadly; Sona was a dear sometimes.

  “I remember her being unreliable,” she continued. “Unpredictable, really. You never knew when she was going to attack you for no reason. I always thought of your relationship with her as, like, a lion tamer versus lion type ordeal. You were the lion tamer, by the way. I remember she had this weird mole—”

  “That’s outrageous,” I replied.

  “How would you describe your relationship with Fiona, then, in retrospect?” ventured Emily. “Old married couple? Parent-child?”

  Everybody giggled the nervous middle school giggle of water-testers.

  “What about doctor-patient?” I offered, eager to demonstrate levity.

  “What about patient-patient?” shot Boots.

  “Hostage,” I went on, “and … emotional terrorist.”

  They laughed generously, and I laughed some, too.

  “Giving Tree and the Kid from The Giving Tree,” I concluded. “That’s the one.”

  It worked, and they let the subject drop for another evening. I didn’t believe a damn word of it—I wanted to, wanted to be the kind of person who could let a big thing go, but—

  Maybe it would come? Maybe it would come and I would believe that we were not supposed to be as we were. Maybe it would come, but it hadn’t come yet.

  After the plates were cleared away that same night, after the toppled carafes of wine, Boots and Emily left to see a movie, so Sona and I remained. Whenever it was only us, it never took long for Sona to loosen, ever so slightly, the stifling belt of her affectations; our conversations had a reliable tendency to dive head-first into the deep end right off the bat.

  “Look, this stuff with Fiona,” she began as soon as I shut the door behind our friends.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t mean to be glib about it.”

  “I know that. I know you don’t. It’s helpful to joke about it—really, it is.”

  “It’s what I do. I understand you’re a sensitive guy, and I appreciate that. I’m not sensitive, so, it’s just what I do.”

  “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Sona.”

  “No, I want to. You’re my friend, and I only have, like, five of those, max. And even though we’re very different people—very different—I think you know that I care—blech!—that I care about how you are. I don’t want you to think I don’t … you know, care, about what you’re dealing with.”

  “I know that you care about me,” I said, conclusively.

  “And you know how uncomfortable I am with you knowing that.”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “I think there is, sure. Look. You know how I’m this stone cold bitch who doesn’t have feelings?” she asked me, smiling the way she always did, the way she had to let you know that you could never know the earnest, honest truth. And her dark eyes would say: “track my secret,” every time.

  “I know how you project that, sure. I know it isn’t true.”

  “Well, it isn’t true,” she confided, and uncrossed her arms.

  “I know,” I said after a moment.

  “I’m familiar with feelings,” she said, as though I’d tried to drop an obscure reference, “and I’ve been, you know, exposed to them at various points in the past.”

  “Gosh, Sona, that must have been, just, so hard for you,” I mocked, knowing she wouldn’t bring me any closer unless she was absolutely sure that her escape pods—sarcasm, irony, affect—remained operational and nearby.


  “I know how you felt when she left. I mean, I don’t know—I’ve never had a whole … situation … like that. But I … I sympathize, even if I can’t really empathize, technically. She was your other half, all that shit. I get that. I really do. I’m not indifferent to your shit.”

  “Sona, this whole therapy bit you’re doing? You should really consider turning pro.”

  “I’m doing my best to be sincere here. This kind of thing doesn’t come naturally to me. Look, maybe you don’t remember this, but back in the dark ages of, like, a few weeks ago, you told me that you, and I quote, ‘couldn’t ignore the feeling that your world had ended.’ That’s some heavy shit, Leo. That stuck with me. Do you know how scary it is to hear that when you’re one of the people who cares about you—a club of which I am a dues-paying member?”

  “You don’t pay dues.”

  “Emotional dues, Leo.”

  “I get it.”

  “So, you said you were one hundred percent certain that you would never come back from Fiona. You said that. You were dead certain this was the end of the line.”

  “I was, at the time. I was certain.”

  “So?” she prodded.

  “So what?”

  “So, have you noticed that you don’t feel that way anymore?”

  I twisted in my loveseat.

  “I’m still not sure that I’ll ever come back from—”

  “But the world, Leo! The all-consuming end of the—”

  “I don’t think the world has ended anymore, if that’s what you’re asking. Not exactly, anyway.”

  “And so?” she pressed on.

  “And so what?”

  “And so it went away, genius. You thought you’d feel that way forever, but you didn’t. You were wrong. Can we start by admitting this one truth?”

  “That I was wrong?”

  “No,” she hollered, “that feelings go away, and it’s never the end of the world. That’s the thing about being a person, Leo. Every feeling you’ve ever had went away.”