The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  LEO BRICE, STAFF ATTORNEY

  Leo Brice is some sort of a kind snob. He’s been a real mess since Fiona left him for that vacuous prick. He’s a lawyer, incidentally, and while he thinks he could become passionately invested in this sort of work, it’s difficult for him to concentrate on the deaths of others right now, while his is still so fresh. What went wrong? He runs it back, daily, even now, months later, and will for some time. Just the other night, unsleeping like all others, he reached for a book—something dusty, something dry enough to anesthetize—and carelessly flipped to the inscription she had scrawled inside of the cover not ten months prior: “I love you more and more each day, my Dearest Friend. xoxo, F.” This was The Collected Letters of John and Abigail Adams, once a birthday present, now another chalky half-column scattered among the ruins of their vast romantic empire. Listen to him prattle on! She wasn’t so great, dammit. Once you go, you don’t get to be great anymore—she forfeited the right to keep the all-bright things about her. If you run off, you can’t be so smart, and you can’t be very funny, you cannot be wry or vulnerable. If you don’t exist, you can’t be anything at all. Listen to this utter garbage! This is at once the end of the world, and not.

  How utterly goddamn silly.

  THREE

  YOU LIVE YOUR WHOLE LIFE AS THOUGH it were an ongoing story, but when someone leaves, here is what happens: you wake up the next morning, and all of a sudden you are an epilogue. I dragged myself wrackful through the same environment I’d always known, but absent Fiona those first days seemed to be little more than a ghostly and meaningless afterword, past pluperfect where a present tense ought to be. I remember thinking about God for the first time in ages—I hadn’t really bought into growing up (not much, anyway), but I came around to the idea not long after I met her. I just couldn’t believe that a rudderless universe would have allowed us to come together like that. I had no doubt, none at all, that our little confluence had been preordained by the Holy Whatever; when I found her, it was so much like finding the lock the key fit—at last, at last. Fiona was gone, and I still believed in God, only now I understood that She is a monster.

  Fifty-six days were lost that summer to the New York State Bar Examination, and this thing happened on day fifty-eight, the second-cheapest champagne from the liquor store not yet dry on the loveseat. Boots and I weren’t starting work at New Salem until halfway through September, which gave me nearly eight weeks to lie on the floor and dodge phone calls from the people I loved most. I didn’t go home to my parents; I didn’t go anywhere, and Boots and Sona were the only two people I let into my building during that long dark vacancy—a new house rule. Otherwise, I dealt exclusively with strangers. I started sitting down in the shower, sometimes for an hour or more. I ate and drank alone each day. I stopped wondering about anything, and dimly chased her ghost around the apartment, slouching from bathroom to kitchen to bed like a wounded animal.

  Bzzzzzzzz.

  “Dude,” crackled Boots into the ancient intercom. “The government sent me to make sure you’re alive today.”

  This was the seventeenth of August: three weeks into the new calendar, the one Fiona invented by leaving.

  “How we doing today, buddy?” Boots asked, first thing.

  “I think I’m dying, Boots.”

  “Still emo. That’s wonderful. You know, I can never tell whether you’re actually depressed or whether you’re just regular-sad and doing a little commentary about depression.”

  “Me neither sometimes,” I conceded, because it was good to have one sharp ally. I was actually depressed that day.

  “So I’ll ask again, and maybe you can shoot for an under-the-top response this time: Leo, how are you?”

  “I’ve had better months. All of them, actually,” I croaked truthfully, burrowing further into the easy chair.

  “And I understand that, but I’m going to keep asking from time to time, just so we can be sure that you’re on an upward trajectory.”

  “I’m fine. I need time, you know? To process. More time.”

  Boots was a tremendous pal, and perfectly suited to this particular tragedy. He’d had an engagement broken off prior to law school which nearly wrecked him, and that gave him a survivor’s view—an aerial perspective on my suffering that I could never hope to comprehend from way down here on the molten ground.

  At thirty, he was four years my senior, but his face bore the crags and heavy remembrances of a much older man. He had a face like an old wooden workbench—angular, unshaved, and dusty, and were it not for his hollow cheeks, we could have easily been mistaken for brothers. Before law school he’d been a drummer for a hyper-locally renowned three-piece Brooklyn outfit called Snaggletooth. I joined him on guitar half a dozen times—most often at lushy student organization parties—and together with our bassist acquaintance, Shira Pollard, and Gracie, herself a vivid singer and serviceable pianist, there was much talk of dropping out and making a go of it (what would we call our ragtag band? “Counselor,” it was decided). Never happened.

  “You gotta clean this place up, man.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “These flowers are dying,” Boots pointed out, as he plucked an ashen ex-carnation from the vase on the table.

  “I know. Fiona got them for me—for the Bar, I guess—and I, uh, appreciate the metaphor.”

  Boots picked up a bag of grapes from the kitchen counter and began to casually whip them at my chest, one at a time.

  “Hey!” he hollered.

  “What?”

  “Hey!”

  “What? Stop that.”

  “How long are you going to be like this for?” he asked, the next grape striking me squarely on the forehead.

  “I don’t know. How long did it take you to snap out of it?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “Okay, so, it sounds like I’ve got a year minus three weeks before you can pass judgment on my mood.”

  “It’s not healthy to be this devastated. Trust me. You’ve gotta get out there, you know? Out into the open air. Embrace the fresh start! I don’t want to have to explain why you’re such a sad sack to all of our fancy new colleagues when we get to the New Salem joint. I don’t want to have to come up here next week and have you be, you know, dead, or something dramatic like that.”

  “Ugh.”

  “It’s transition time, man. It’s moving day. This is a big, critical moment for you; you just got out of a five-year-old relationship. It’s time to grow up and move along and all that.”

  “Three years,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Fiona and I were together for a little over three years.”

  “I know that.”

  “You said I just got out of a five-year relationship.”

  “I said you got out of a five-year-old relationship,” clarified Boots as he launched the final grape and I swatted it away.

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t referring to duration. I meant both of you acted like five-year-olds. Real relationships are not supposed to be that twee.”

  “Twee?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think we were twee?”

  “Very much so. You two existed in this fantasy romance world that nobody else was privy to. It’s not your fault, man—she was a strange one, and you’re a little strange too, so I’m sure it was easy to fall into all that. Look, Fiona was great, but Fiona is gone. She does not exist anymore.”

  “Of this … I am … aware,” I sighed.

  “It will end up having been for the best. That’s always how it works, and if you could be objective about the situation, you would agree with that.”

  “That’s not necessarily true, at all. You know? What if I’m not okay? What if this is the worst thing that has ever happened or that ever will happen, Boots? I can’t even wrap my mind around it. She just … unceremoniously broke up with me.”

  “And what? You wanted it to be ceremonious?”

  “I would�
�ve liked a ceremony, sure. Candles. Some chanting, you know, Gregorian chants, maybe. Or a live band. A ceremony would’ve been nice.”

  “There’s that rapier wit. He lives! I gotta run,” he said, and started to walk out of my haunted apartment. “Are you going to kill yourself?” he asked me, I think at least half-earnestly, from the doorframe.

  “No.”

  “Is that a promise? Because if I leave here, and you kill yourself, I’m going to be furious.”

  “I so promise,” I said, saluting for no reason.

  “Okay, great.”

  “I will say,” I started, “you know, thank God my number one fear is death. Because I’m pretty sure my number two fear is having to live like this, without her. I will say that.”

  “Okay, Leo? This is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. That’s the sort of thing that people who kill themselves say before they … do it.”

  “I was just making an honest observation.”

  “Alright. I gotta go pick up Emily at the airport. Sona said she’s bringing you food tomorrow. Don’t kill yourself!”

  “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “Don’t do it!” he shouted from the hallway, leaving the door open, as he always did lately, just so that I would have to distinguish myself from the easy chair for a few seconds in order to fling it shut.

  * * *

  “Leo, will you teach me about contracts?” Fiona asked me once from behind a pair of her mother’s oversized glasses she borrowed from the 1970s.

  “Serious or kidding?”

  “Serious, I think. I’d like to know something about it, in case, you know, anyone ever asks me to sign one. For acting, I mean.”

  By the spring of 2010, this wasn’t out of the question; Fiona was still a year and several months away from booking Mercy General, but did have several small television spots to her credit.

  “Well, you know that they’re essentially, just, agreements,” I began.

  “Obviously.”

  “The terms of which are bargained for.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “By two or more parties acting in good faith.”

  “Leooooo.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re looking for here, Fiona. In class, we usually only deal with them after somebody has breached their end of the agreement.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “What do I do then?”

  “I mean, what happens? Wait, no—I know what happens: they sue. It’s a lawsuit!” she declared, and she did a little lawsuit dance.

  “Well, sure. That’s pretty much it.”

  “Tell me about that. How do they fix a broken contract?”

  “Okay, well, the idea is that, usually, at least, the courts will try to restore the party who’s been aggrieved to the position they’d be in had the contract not been breached. It’s called ‘expectation damages.’ I mean, there’s a lot more to it than that, but the sort of basic, fundamental idea is that you want to make the other person—the non-breacher—the courts will focus on making the other person whole.”

  “Making the other person whole? That sounds so romantic!”

  “I assure you it’s not.”

  “You know what I’m going to say now, right?”

  “I assure you I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. Leo…”

  “Fiona?”

  “Leo, darling…”

  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “Leo, my dearest, deepest love…”

  “Can I help you?”

  “Light of my life … fire of my loins … my sin … my song…”

  “It’s ‘soul,’ not ‘song.’ Don’t come at me with the Lolita if you’re not going to—”

  “It’s both for me. Soul, song. You know why?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You … make … me … whole.”

  She pounced upon me like a devilish idea, cackling to herself and pinning my arms against the deep-red spackle of the wall. We were in the waiting area of some Moroccan restaurant; the grim hostess and a blond couple with their blond child glared at the scene we were making, and we glared right back.

  “There’s also restitution,” I hissed into her ear as she nipped away at my neck.

  “Restitution doesn’t make you whole?” she breathed up to me.

  “It puts you back,” I muttered, “it puts you back to where you were pre-contract, before you ever exchanged promises.”

  She clamped down hard now on what I believed to be my jugular vein.

  “Sounds like it makes you whole.”

  “I guess so, in a way,” I answered, “it makes you the whole version you used to be. But it doesn’t make you the whole that you could have been, in the future, had the other side come through the way they were supposed to.”

  “That’s still mostly whole, though. It’s like you never made a contract at all?”

  “Uh-huh. Ow! Mostly whole, sure.”

  “Leo, party of two?” sang the sad-eyed hostess, and we whisked past the disapproving blondies to a table in the back.

  * * *

  The first time I met the actor, Mark Renard, he complimented me on my handshake.

  “That’s a great handshake, bro,” said he.

  Mark had dark features and was inexcusably handsome—Fiona once pointed out aptly that he resembled the evil prince from just about every Disney movie. He was also probably the dumbest human being I have ever met. Not just dumb: he was eagerly dumb, aggressively so. He maintained a stunning capacity for misapprehension and verbal crisis. Every thought his bird brain bred seemed to wriggle its way free from the leash of basic intelligence. Every sentence he deployed was a kamikaze pilot, content to destroy itself and everything around it in the service of stupidity.

  Fiona used to rag on him constantly—a sure sign, of course, but only in retrospect—confiding in me each new act of witless wonder her co-star managed to perpetrate on set.

  “His favorite book—no kidding—is Atlas Shrugged. I don’t even think he’s political or anything; I think he just genuinely likes the story.”

  Heh.

  “He called me a nerd last night because I used the word ‘superfluous.’”

  That’s hilarious, Fee.

  “He wants us to go to the MoMA with him and his new girlfriend, only he pronounces it ‘momma.’ She’s an actual runway model!”

  Please tell me we’re not doing that with them.

  “He told me today that he’s ‘looking into Scientology.’”

  Whoa. Cuh-razy.

  “He wears a fucking hemp necklace.”

  This guy seems pretty absurd.

  At that time, Mark could reasonably be called a B-lister: famous enough to play a major character on a long-running television show, but not famous enough to have yet broken into film. As an actor, he was reliably one-note—that tired note, though, was of course the very tonic of commercial success. He could look deeply into anything and think deeply into nothing, and on screen that was enough.

  I think he was my opposite. He had the look of a person who slept soundly, every night. I was, and am, completely uninterested in the lives of the well-rested. What is it they’re not up thinking about each evening, over there, sealed off from the bountiful haunts and burdens of personhood? It’s almost inhuman. And how could a person so self-conscious not also be at least mildly self-aware? I decided that Mark Renard was little more than a born philistine desperately eager for soul. Who really knows, though: maybe it isn’t true. But I am allowed to decide things about the person who took Fiona away from me. He really did seem this way; he really did wear a hemp necklace.

  I used to hang around the set of Mercy General sometimes, and marvel at the operation. Everybody whirring; everybody so damn serious—about what? The show was terrible. Assistant directors flailing wildly about like shot birds; extras gamboling across the lot; craft services people busying themselves with the precise placement of endless tureens of hummus. Mark, with his trapezoid jaw and oafis
h perma-furrow, running lines with my Fiona—a twelve-dollar kiddie-pool of hair gel splashing pitifully against the ocean of her inborn talent. I used to hang around that set, before the whole of the world got away from me.

  The summer that her character was killed off was the same summer I spent studying for the bar exam. Boots and I were set to begin work at the New Salem Institute that fall, and, for the first time in my life, I had discovered a bona fide professional ambition. I actually wanted to be a lawyer; not simply to get smart or fend off the future, I wanted to use this degree of mine for a purpose—the only cause I would ever deem worthy of my sweet, constantly diminishing time. I wanted to advocate against death.

  As it happens, they don’t pay you to advocate against your own, and so representing people for whom the state had wrongly (or, at least, in a constitutionally suspect manner) invited the monster along early struck me as a decent enough surrogate for the time being. Death couldn’t be abolished, not yet, at least, but it could be staved off. And who better to stave it off for than those who were facing the prospect of an artificial ending brought on by a wrongful conviction? If I had to engage daily with this world of stern dictates and high-handed falderal, better that it should be done in this way, with this firm posture—opposed, opposed, opposed to death, and not merely to the penalty, but to the very premise as well.

  This newfound fervor—my solitary crusade to halt, for a handful of wretches, the inching glacier of death on a technicality—sparked an unexpected urgency around passing the bar. Summer nights were given over to lamp-lit flashcards and byzantine mnemonics. Summer mornings belonged to interminable lecture videos, which always featured some gray shill holding court in an empty room, waxing breathlessly on third party interpleaders or the exclusion of relevant evidence or the Takings Clause. Fiona rose at seven most mornings to make it over to the set; even on those days when she wasn’t on the call sheet, she’d occasionally leave just as early to practice her lines or get breakfast with the cast. Some days, I didn’t see her until the evenings, when I’d take a break from studying and she’d return after the shooting had wrapped, and she would be airtight, reserved, humble, and quick to seek sex.