The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  “Are you really dating your physical therapist?” she asked on her arrival.

  “Hola,” Lita called out from her rocking chair.

  “Hola, ma’am,” Sona answered without looking over. “Leo, you’re dating your physical therapist?”

  “I’m sort of trying to, I guess. Yes. We just started.”

  “Okay,” she said, then glanced over at Lita, who was lovingly stroking Rafi’s gnarled pelt. “Is that the old lady you live with?”

  “Don’t be rude, Sona,” I admonished her.

  “She doesn’t speak English, right?” she countered.

  “No.”

  “Then it isn’t rude. And she’s very old. That’s her?”

  “Yes; that’s her,” I said.

  “And that’s the dog?” she asked, indicating Rafael Uribe Uribe with a swift twitch of her head.

  “Of course that’s the dog.”

  “Okay,” Sona went on. She was taking the measure of the evening. “And the kid gets here when?”

  “She’s being dropped off in half an hour,” I replied.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding in begrudging approval. “This will be fine. When Emily gets here, this will be fine.”

  Emily got there, and the kid did too, and the six of us—Elise, Rafi, Lita, Sona, Emily, and I—promptly took in a buoyant, computer-animated film about a shark who was friendly but misunderstood. We ate a great deal of popcorn, and only two of us cried during the movie. Later, while we were making drawings, Elise asked me if I was her uncle.

  “No, sweetheart, I’m not,” I told her.

  “But my mommy said you were my Uncle Lee-Lo,” the little one sang, about as adorably as you might imagine.

  “Well,” I began to explain, “I’m friends with your mommy, and I’m friends with your Auntie Luz, too. And I’m friends with your Abuelita, and I’m friends with Rafi. And sometimes when people say ‘uncle’ what they really mean is ‘friend.’”

  “You’re not my uncle?” she clarified.

  “Not technically,” I answered.

  “So who are you?” she cooed, then peered up at Sona and added an emphatic: “Who is he?”

  “Elise, this is Leo,” Sona responded. “He’s a self-hating egomaniac.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “He’s a very confused young man,” she went on. “For example, he’s rushing into something with his physical therapist, if you can believe it. I mean, come on, right?”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “He’s hard to pin down, Elise. A real mystery, this one is.”

  “Thanks for that, Sona,” I said.

  “No problem, Uncle Lee-Lo,” she replied.

  When it came time to put Elise to bed, I released Emily and Sona from active duty, freeing them to start in on the evening’s wine. I searched for a decent story from among the scant collection of children’s books gathering dust in the room that had belonged to Luz’s youngest daughter, and chose the only one I recognized.

  “This is an old story, Elise. Older than me. Definitely older than your mom and dad; it’s probably even older than your Abuelita. It’s called The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, and it was written by a woman named Margery Williams.”

  “Okay,” she said sleepily.

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you ready?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she nodded, and I opened the worn front cover.

  “Alright. ‘There was once a velveteen rabbit,’” I began, “‘and in the beginning he was really splendid.’”

  Elise burrowed into the side of me like a cub, and lubberly rubbed her eyes. Were we ever that young, my friends and I? No, we were not. Not according to my memory—in my memory, there is nothing at all before the first grade.

  “‘For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and then aunts and uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten.’”

  There are enormous gaps in my memory; I really only kept the few handfuls I could draw from the ocean of all that’s happened, and one day every last drop of it will slip through my fingers. Losing memories is easy, and looking back—there are things I went through that no one can recall. Much of the past is as obscure, now, as the whole of the future.

  “‘He was naturally shy, and being made only of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real.’”

  A faulty memory could help explain why we don’t remember having existed all those many times before. If I went back to the hospital where I was born, I’m sure I’d have no sense that I’d been alive there once: I wouldn’t remember the hospital; I wouldn’t remember me in the hospital.

  “‘For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.’”

  Maybe there are things about Fiona I don’t remember all that well. I remember lying, side by side, in a hospital.

  “‘What is real?’ asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. ‘Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?’ ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you.’”

  I hope that I forget all of this—every last moment on Earth, and especially the best ones. I hope I forget my friends. I hope I forget Fiona and her goddamn theories. I hope I forget the way that Jane and I loved each other fully for so many years. I hope I forget Michael in the moment he went away. I hope I forget the past.

  I like remembering it now, of course, while the present is still mostly intact. But someday I’d like to forget that I was ever here, because if I can forget all this, it opens up the possibility that I’ve forgotten it all before—once, or a million times. And that would mean—what? That I can do it all a million times again. That I can repeat myself. That I’ll have another chance, an endless series of chances, to dance against my better judgment at some awful college party. That I’ll learn to love and loathe the law. That I can wander the earth, an absent-minded fool, not saving Michael on an endless loop. A near-syllogism: if I’ve forgotten that I’ve come this way before, there’s still a chance I can come this way again. Have I already said all of this? Have I already let go of Fiona a million times before? Can I live it all out in endless iterations, and hurt, and forget, and grow, and forget, and forget, and forget, and forget. If so, I am confident that I can make death irrelevant. If I can only come back, and meet her again, and lose her again, and hurt, and get better, meet Rachel, and lose her, again, meet Jane, and keep her, and go, come back—I hope I’m repeating myself. I wanted to feel the same way over and over. In spite of everything, I want to learn it all over again.

  “‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’ ‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’ ‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.’”

  Elise had long since gone to sleep, her small bright body turned to lead in my weary arms, but I read on, faintly, all the same. I wanted very badly to remember what came next.

  “‘He thought of those long sunlit hours in the garden—how happy they were—and a great sadness came over him. He seemed to see them all pass before him, each more beautiful than the other, the fairy huts in the flower-bed, the quiet evenings in the wood when he lay in the bracken and the little ants ran over his paws; the wonderful day when he first knew that he was Real. He thought of the Skin Horse, so wise and gentle, and all that he had told him. Of what us
e was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this? And a tear, a real tear, trickled down his little shabby velvet nose and fell to the ground. And then a strange thing happened.’”

  TEN

  THREE DAYS BEFORE HE DIED, I’D GONE to visit Michael for the very last time.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d come back down to these parts again,” he said as the guards walked him into the neon-lit room. “Brother Leo, let me just ask you: are y’all friends with the Governor?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Is there some soup-ream judge up in our nation’s capital who owes you a mighty big favor?”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Well, did you happen to bring with you a fast car and some heavy ammunition today?”

  “I did not.”

  “Alright,” he said, “so I’m correct in thinking that you’re here at last as a brother and not, as you’ve long maintained, as my alleged attorney?”

  I smiled at this, although I knew that below the banter he was just as tense as I was.

  “That’s right, Brother Michael,” I told him.

  The guards freed his hands from their restraints, and he swung his brittle wrists around wildly, provoking a flurry of cracks.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said flatly, adding seconds later: “Get it? I’ll be damned?”

  “I get it, Michael.”

  “I’m told they call that ‘gallows humor,’” he chirped with a self-satisfied air.

  “Indeed they do,” I replied. He seemed more animated than usual, and I cringed at the sight of him, alive but damned, squirming like a child in his folding chair.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said delicately, “I’ll have the pleasure of speaking with Sister Rachel again?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said—we’d broken things off a few days before.

  “Well, that right there is a mighty shame,” he declared. And then: “I heard you met my own lost lady?”

  “Who, Therese?”

  “The one and truly,” he said, grinning weakly.

  “How did you know about that?”

  “I hear things,” he said. “You ain’t my only source of news and information, Brother Leo.”

  I smirked at him, but didn’t follow up. As was our custom in moments of gravity, we let a long, pregnant pause come to term in lieu of further discussion.

  “So Monday’s the day,” he said with resignation at last. “The bitch of it is, there’s so much more I wanted to learn about while I was around. So much more I wanted to think about, and say. No time now.”

  “Have you thought about it?” I asked, then immediately regretted asking, then continued anyway. “Have you thought about what you’ll say at the end?”

  Michael laughed a little to himself, a sort of private laugh I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand—not yet.

  “You mean have I thought about my words,” he said, staring off beyond me.

  “Your last words,” I corrected him.

  “There’s the rub, I suppose,” he said, then looked back to me. “That would be Brother William: ‘there’s the rub.’ I read all that too. Shakespeare. Plato. Not just the liturgy. More to truth than faith, you know.”

  “I certainly hope so,” I replied. “What do you mean, ‘there’s the rub?’”

  “My brother, don’t you spot my meaning? There can’t be any ‘last words’ in’smuch as there ain’t no ‘last.’”

  It was my turn to laugh a little to myself.

  “Of course, Brother Michael.”

  “But you still want to ask the question,” he continued, and ran a slow paw west-to-east across his stubble.

  “If it’s alright with you. Have you thought about the words you’ll say before the execution?”

  He closed his wild eyes so tightly I was certain they’d burst, and began softly to speak:

  “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God, begotten of the father before all worlds; God of God, light of light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried; and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

  A minute passed in stillness, and then:

  “Olam Haba,” Michael said, opening his eyes at last.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “‘Olam Haba’—what is that? Is that part of the last words?”

  “No,” he replied, “that part’s just for you, Brother Leo. It’s pretty much sort of the Jewish version of the words. It’s a heck of a lot shorter in Hebrew.”

  “But what does it mean?” I pressed him, and a brief glow crept back into his face.

  “According to your own tradition—to Jewish tradition, that is—when you die, your soul is brought to judgment. And if you lived a good life, you enter into Olam Haba, which means: the World to Come. Now, that old big-thinker Maimonides, he taught that the soul lives inside the body the way a person lives inside a house.”

  He paused, and stared directly into my eyes before continuing.

  “The way a person lives inside a prison. You die, and the soul sort of just peels away. And it goes on without the rest of you, living other lives in other worlds.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “It’s the closest thing y’all got to a resurrection,” he explained apologetically. “That’s pretty much it.”

  I decided later that there was no world to come. Not on some distant planet in utero, at least—not out beyond the things we’ve come to know. Our tomorrows, I thought, are the ones we’ve always heard about; our future is here.

  And then, later still, I came to think: well, maybe that’s not true, and maybe I can count on coming back this way over and over again.

  Even later, I will come to understand that we don’t get to know. It’s good that we don’t get to know.

  When the time came, I stood to leave the neon-lit room once and for all, and I was shaking.

  “Brother Leo,” he called out to me, and I froze; I couldn’t turn around to face him. “Brother Leo?” he said again, his voice cracking just slightly.

  “I have to go now, Michael,” I whispered with my back to him still, but it circumnavigated the whole of the Earth and he heard me.

  “Leo,” he said. “I’m so … sorry, Leo. I did it.”

  * * *

  Three Mondays after the Monday that Michael was executed, I made my way back to the sparse, gutty offices of the New Salem Institute. The first person I saw there was Martha, beaming.

  “He lives!” she hollered down the hallway and through the still-parting elevator doors, and I winced at the sudden attention.

  “Hi, boss,” I sheepishly replied.

  “Come on; come in, come in,” she said, ushering me into her office. “A little bird told me you’d be dropping in today, Leo. I’m beyond glad to see you. Look at you—you shaved!”

  “So I did,” I said, leaning my crutches up against the doorframe. I flopped my body onto the leather couch, and sighed for the effort.

  “You look like a person!”

  “Thanks.”

  “A real person, I mean. A person who is thinking, perhaps, about coming back to work?�
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  The time I’d spent away after Georgia had been mostly given over to recovery (of a life and, less gravely, of a ligament). This had been fruitful, I’d thought; Lita and Rafi were always there, so I never was left alone. Boots and Sona came around to indulge my lingering questions and wean me off of remorse. Even Rachel was speaking to me again. And now there was Jane. If the future wasn’t entirely bright, at the very least, for the first time in ages, it was there. I could see it.

  “I was hoping we might talk about that,” I said, and Martha whisked a thick gray binder from her desk. “I, uh,” I started, and noticed she was paying no attention to me whatsoever—she was rifling through the file. “As you know, Martha, I had a hard time … getting over…”

  She gathered, then lofted, the binder, and it landed heavily on the open seat next to me on the couch. A splotchy stamp on its front read LA-DOC B19411607-2013 PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.

  “Denard W. Cope,” she said.

  “Martha,” I began.

  “We got a ripe one here,” she continued.

  “I’m just not sure I can handle—”

  “You talk about your all-time terrible lawyers, Leo—this guy’s counsel takes the cake.”

  “I was hoping—Martha, I was hoping we could maybe talk—”

  “Here’s what you’re gonna do: you’re gonna go to Louisiana, okay? You ever been to Louisiana? It’s crazy. You’re gonna go down there, and you’re gonna meet this guy, get the scoop, figure out our best play. You’re first chair on this—you and Boots. And Leo—Leo, look at me.”

  I did.

  “Leo, this guy—what’d I say his name was again?”