The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  Not every feeling. She did have a point, though: by that time, I’d begun to think of my time without Fiona as something short of a death. Not quite a life—not the one I’d signed up for—but a kind of afterlife, backward-facing and foggy and still. Devoid of harps and fires alike. Neutral. Post-love.

  “We’re very much alike,” I fired back at her after a full minute of silence. It wouldn’t be a conversation—not for us—if I didn’t try to provoke Sona too.

  “Are we now?”

  “We are. We are.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” she said, “because you’re an enormous train wreck of a human being right now.”

  “You kid, but the truth is, we really are very similar.”

  “Flattering as that is, Mr. Brice, I gotta say I just don’t see it.”

  “I do. You terrify me—you know that? We are very much alike, Sona. I bet you’ve contemplated staying single forever, right?”

  “Oh, so this is about that?” she lilted maniacally, gliding her feet up onto the edge of the couch.

  “About what?”

  “You want me to date you. You desperately want for me to date you. Ugh, this is just pathetic, Leo. You’re better than this.”

  “I don’t want to date you,” I reminded her truthfully.

  “Of course not,” she said, adding truthfully, “and I sure as shit don’t want to date you.”

  “Of course not,” I replied.

  “Because that would be laughably bad for both of us. Two neurotics don’t make an … erotic … hang on. Two neurotics don’t make an erotic—”

  “I get it,” I interrupted.

  “Hang on! I’m working on an idiom.”

  “We’re not talking about that right now,” I went on, ignoring her.

  “So what are we talking about?”

  “We’re talking about this. We’re talking about how you’ve honestly considered quite seriously just being single for the entire rest of your life. I’m right?”

  “So?”

  “It’s okay. What I’m saying is: I’ve thought about that too.”

  “Oh please. How many girls have you been with in the last—”

  “Women.”

  “I actually met some of them, Leo, and they are girls.”

  “They are—”

  “They act like girls.”

  “You’re veering the conversation—”

  “I do not like this conversation,” she snapped back, and retracted her feet up beneath her.

  “We—I mean you and I—above all else, we don’t want to let anyone who is not us inform who, fundamentally, we are,” I continued.

  “We don’t.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what that means. At all.”

  “Have you ever intentionally let anyone get to know you? I mean more than is socially necessary for them to be a friend, or a person you sometimes sleep with, or anything like that? Have you ever, even one time, divulged any piece of information about your fears, or about what you’re really feeling at a given moment?”

  “Arrêtez, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Have you ever voluntarily left yourself open to getting hurt, or changed, or … compromised—in any way? And the answer is: no, no of course you haven’t, because you don’t want to, and you’re very good at what you do.”

  “A great many people are like that,” she countered, looking anywhere but my face.

  “Yes, but they don’t hold up that way for long. But you’re smarter than everyone, so you get to keep doing it for as long as you like.”

  “I’m guarded with myself. You know that. You make me sound selfish.”

  “We’re the same like that! This is what I’m saying. Look, things work out for couples like Emily and Boots, sure. But that’s because they’re not like us; they’re open people, and generous with themselves—with their minds. We are fundamentally not. That’s why things like Fiona happen. I let Fiona in; I let her shape who I was in a thousand ways I’d never let anyone else come close to even breathing on me before. I let her into the museum; I let her fuck around with the art. I bought into the fantasy, okay? And that’s what it was. A big old fantasy of connection. A bad joke. I bought into the fantasy that someone like me can let someone like that in the door and then come away clean. They all believe in it—everyone out there, but not us. Not you and I, I mean. She wasn’t real. She was a fake. A forgery. And look at me now. I swear to God, Sona, I might be ruined.”

  “You’ll get past it, Leo.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  She huffed at me dismissively, and slipped her feet into her boots.

  “Come on, man,” she groaned. “You can’t possibly think I’ve been this way forever, right?”

  “I just figured you were born into it, or something,” I replied.

  “You’re being willfully ignorant, as per usual,” she said. “Of course I’ve been screwed over, Leo; of course I’ve been end-of-the-world hurt before. Of course that’s why I’m the way I am about these things, obviously. Get it? Of course I’ve been hurt like that. News flash: fucking everybody has!”

  “Okay, well,” I responded defensively, “I legitimately didn’t know that, but, thank you for sharing.”

  “You’re just a monster, you know that?”

  “I know,” I said. “So how’d you get past the feeling?”

  “Which feeling?”

  “The feeling that this was the end of the world.”

  “I don’t know. I panicked. I really did, you know—I really did think it was the end of the world. And I believe that you think that, too. I’m sure you’re still not sure how you’re supposed to be after this, but it’s been months now, and Boots is right: you need to start thinking about the rest of your life as, you know, the rest of your life. So back when I was going through some of this stuff—way, way back—I was thinking about it, trying to snap myself out of it, and here’s what I came up with. I said to myself, ‘Sona,’ I said, ‘you’re an organism. You’re full of the science of human existence; you’re full of the magic of human existence—you’ve got soul, baby! And maybe you’ve got just this one lifetime … just the one opportunity … to exist! One shot at an experience, and you’re going to waste it—what? Being tired? Being sad? Mad at the other organisms? Fuck no.’ That’s what I told myself, anyway, although I’m not sure yet whether any of it has sunk in. For now, it’s just an attempted mantra.”

  “Well,” I said, “thanks for that. Really—thank you. I know you don’t like to talk about this, and I think—I think maybe I still need time. I’m not back yet—I do know that. I don’t feel like I’m … I don’t know how to get back.”

  “Okay. Well … thanks to you too, I guess. But just so you know, even though I just … shared a little, just now, I want you to understand that we are emphatically not alike.”

  “Of course we are, Sona,” I said. “Of course we’re alike. We know from loneliness, and we know that it’s the price you pay for controlling your own narrative. We accept that. Look, going through this has been basically impossible, but it has made me think more about loneliness. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, really—loneliness of the soul: soul-loneliness. And I just am telling you that I’m here also. And I’m like you. I know you. Do you get that? I know how difficult it is to have to live inside yourself all the time. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I know you. There is another Skywalker. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Sona stretched herself wide in every direction, drained the last of the wine, and walked briskly out of the apartment without saying another word.

  * * *

  I never did fall in love with New York. I wanted to—I wanted to love it the way Woody Allen loved it, the way Gershwin must have—but I never could make it mine. How was it that every law of loneliness could cease to apply at city limits? Eight million people, and it could just as easily have been eight for all the good it did me. I grew to see right through them, to brush
every last million away as though they were fronds leaking from the wet and gruesome jungle out onto my trail. My trail, me. The poetry I’d once heard in the arrhythmic bustle, the electricity I’d once seen in the currents of those crowded streets, the grace notes I’d so often detected in the vendor’s bark, in the madwoman’s cry, in the tonant screeee of the halting subway train: all of it now felt irredeemably tossed-off.

  New York didn’t care whether I lived or died, nor, for that matter, did eight million minus maybe-a-dozen of them New Yorkers. There was a time when I found them charming as a breed: hectic, yes, and aggressive, but ultimately harmless; not icy but hot-hearted, and there was something commendable in that. I’d once found it quaint that they believed Central Park was nature—maybe because I grew up in the sylvestral paradise of Northern New England. I envied their unfailing pride of place. Now, of course, at the very moment my world chose so cruelly to revolve around me, their solipsism and their brusqueness made me ill.

  A couple of years ago, Sona told me something about New York City that I’ll never forget: within the confines of the five boroughs, she’d read, more than eight hundred different languages are regularly spoken. Just sort of offhand, I told her that eight hundred was about twice as many languages as I would’ve guessed still existed in the entire world, and she coyly raised up her chatoyant eyes and smiled.

  “Inchqan lezoo imanas, aynqan mart es, homeboy,” she intoned.

  “What’s that? Is that Armenian? I don’t know what that means.”

  “Oh, but don’t you understand, Leo?” she trilled, pressing her small hand defiantly against my shoulder. “You don’t get to know what everything means.”

  * * *

  It used to be that there was always an age you could look forward to as the age at which everything was finally going to happen. When I was nine, eleven was the top of the mountain—a million large-font novellas said so, and I was told there would be girls and sports. When I was fourteen, sixteen was it; when I was seventeen, I knew it had to be twenty-one, and so it went until it stopped. There comes a time when the person you aspire most to be is a person you were, some old edition that either lived up to the hype or more likely didn’t, and the things you have coming seem: not unwelcome, but not nearly so warm as the old batches of newness to which you were long accustomed—prosy stacks of multi-grain bread standing in for the epic cake of youth.

  This isn’t such a bad thing. At twenty-seven, when taking a break from my moping about, I really do look forward to the things I am supposed to. I always wanted to be a husband and a father, and it’s a small comfort to me, at least, that those are the very things that humankind more or less reckons I ought to consider next. I’m glad I am content with the challenges and expectations of the world: they are fine challenges and worthy expectations. Given two hundred thousand years of humanity, it was wildly unlikely that something so gauzy as romantic sadness would ever come close to registering as my chief hurdle—probability suggests that I could very well have been running from lions at this age, or slogging across barren continents, or getting murdered by any of various popular hordes. All told, it’s a terribly interesting time on Earth, and I can acquire a little necessary happiness from the fact that I was dropped off here and not elsewhere.

  I thought about this—about the quirks of cosmic timing—when Martha Bok called me and Rachel Costa into her office to tell us that we had been chosen to run point on the Michael Tiegs case (“first chair,” she called it, although staff attorneys like me never saw the inside of a courtroom). In the three months I’d been at the New Salem Institute, I worked consistently for multiple clients at once, but always as support counsel in the New York office. I’d never spoken to an inmate before, nor had I ever seen the interior of a proper prison; now I was being handed a thick gray binder stamped GA-DOC 1138 PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, and an itinerary detailing my Monday flight to Hartsfield, the rental car reservation code, accommodations at the Days Inn, and directions to death row.

  “What’s his story?” asked Rachel with heartfelt concern, drawing a sweep of loose black bangs off her forehead with three fingers.

  Rachel was polished, and conjured up images of autumn: scratchy knit sweaters and warm mugs of cider, the silver wisps of apple steam forming a perfect ess above the lip. She struck me as noble—elegant even, but perhaps too elegant for the barking, frequently futile sort of work that we did. She may have been … I don’t know. Uptight. It was difficult to say.

  “Halfway house employee gets murdered—a therapist, slept around with his patients, one of whom is the girlfriend of our guy; state says our guy did it,” Martha rattled back. “Our guy—that’s Tiegs—maintains his innocence from the beginning and throughout the appeals process. No witnesses to the crime, and our guy doesn’t make for the most presentable defendant. Surprise, surprise, not much of a defense is mounted. Sounds familiar, right? Right. Okay. Thing is, the prosecutors thought for a while that the girlfriend did it, this … Calley. Therese Calley. Cops did too—they pushed on our guy, on Tiegs, but they got nothing out of him on her, so, predictably, they went after him. Counsel is less than worthless; a couple of local advocacy groups pick it up on appeal, but the word on the street is they have to convince him—you with me?—actually convince him to keep fighting the charges, even though he still claims he’s innocent. I don’t know what it … he found religion, made peace, I don’t know. He’s hot and cold, according to the folks I talked to. Too big a strain on their resources, so they called us, and Tiegs agreed to meet with us—with you. Begrudgingly agreed, I might add, although he was more than happy to dispose of his prior counsel. Still with me here?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Hang on,” responded Rachel quizzically. “Just so I’m clear: you’re saying he doesn’t necessarily want a reprieve?”

  “I’m saying,” Martha replied, leaning back at a borderline fatal angle in her desk chair, “this will be an intriguing case for a couple of first-time gumshoes such as yourselves. It’ll be a challenge, okay? And you know I have faith in the both of you.”

  “Well … thank you,” said Rachel, sitting tidily and smiling.

  “Martha, I think gumshoes are detectives,” I added.

  “Gumshoe; shyster—what difference does it make?” she tittered back. “Just go be the lawyers I know you can be. This guy may need to have his hand held a little bit to see the light, but he’s letting us in the door, and your job is to go advocate for him zealously. You’re gonna go do that. Okay?”

  Rachel looked first at me, with searching eyes, then back at Martha.

  “Okay,” she said brightly, and I nodded in turn.

  “Okay,” said Martha.

  As we rose to leave, she called me back into the room for another moment.

  “Leo, before you go down there, I just want to make sure you’re ready for this.”

  “Of course I’m ready,” I answered. “Why would you—”

  “Please. I know what’s up, Leo. I know what’s up with my lawyers. Hey Leo? Look at me,” said Martha, furiously snapping her fingers at my quiet head as I leafed through the dossier, avoiding her present avenue. “You got this.”

  “No, I—thank you,” I muttered, tilting up.

  Martha was a glorious person, all energy and class and elfin, silvery brilliance. She cared about us as lawyers, yes, but more fiercely as people; so profound was her care, in fact, that she frequently took it upon herself to meddle in our personal affairs. This was done with heroic intent, always, but nevertheless this was done. And on this day, this was being done hard.

  “Leo, you know exactly what to do. Rachel knows exactly what to do. You’re gonna go to Jackson, Georgia, and you’re gonna see Tiegs and you’re gonna talk to him. You’re gonna take the weekend—you have any plans this weekend?”

  “I do not.”

  “That’s what I like to hear! You’re gonna take the weekend and you’re gonna learn absolutely everything there is to know about this guy. Oka
y? You’re gonna immerse yourself in his life and in his case history. Got it? I want you to know every motion raised at trial and on appeal. Okay? Every objection in the record. And—Leo, are you listening?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “Leo, it occurs to me that a really effective way to do all of this would be to ask Rachel out to dinner.”

  “Uh, Martha.”

  “Not out to dinner, of course—no time for that. But! You order Chinese food or something, you go through the court transcripts together—”

  “Martha—”

  “It might be good for you, Leo.”

  “Martha, I’m not sure what gave you the impression that I’m looking—”

  “I’m telling you, this might be the right thing for you right now. None of my business, of course, but this is how the sparks fly.”

  “Nope—what am I saying? I know exactly what gave you the impression that I’m—”

  “Boots said you’re sad, Leo. He said you’re monumentally sad.”

  “… feels like there’s a line—”

  “He said you were, quote, ‘kind of a piece of shit right now,’ Leo. That’s what your friend said about you. And that makes me sad.”

  “Colorful phrasing.”

  “I’m not talking about your work, here—we love your work. Everybody just wants you to be happy! Boots said you used to be a generally happy guy.”

  “Everybody? Is this really something that gets talked about?”

  “Yes. Okay? You’re part of our family now, Leo. We care about how you’re doing, and I for one think that you and Rachel—”

  “Just to be clear—”

  “Two bright young kids—”

  “Just to be clear, you—my boss—are encouraging me to participate in some interoffice … um…”

  “I’m encouraging happiness.”

  “Got it.”

  “Come on, Leo. She’s kind, she’s gorgeous, she’s smarter than you, you’re attracted to her—what more could you want?”

  “How would you know if I was attracted to her?”