The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  This time I had nothing; I gathered up words and spilled them back down, and wound up gulping at the dim air.

  “Leo,” she went on, “I’ve been feeling stuck here sometimes, and I haven’t really … known what to do about it. I’ve felt stuck with work, with the show, and I’ve felt stuck with us—like with this feeling of inevitability, if that even makes sense, of like a track that I can’t—”

  “A track?” I offered dumbly.

  “I think that I need to find out who I am independently of us—of, just, what I’m like without … without us.”

  “Without me,” I quietly croaked.

  “Without us. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve been together for so long, and not just together, but … integrated—an item, one item, that isn’t really either of us at all. I feel like the things I like are the things that we like: the music, the … food, the—everything, and that never used to be the case before. And that sort of scares me. It scares me that I don’t really know myself, or what I would care about if I didn’t have someone else there, sort of cultivating all of that. And I need to know what else there is that I can be, just I—and I know that sounds harsh. I do know that, and I’m … it’s why I need to go, Leo, it’s … that’s why I have to be gone.”

  I sank deeply into the foam as the words stacked up against my body. We were still for a while, then—a breather—and then came this.

  “And for work—from a work standpoint … for my career and this thing that I’ve wanted to be my whole life, I think me leaving is what’s best. And LA is where that all happens; I can’t do that, I don’t think, if I’m not out there in LA; I just can’t do it here.”

  “Fiona,” I eked out between the long, slow heaves of my system, “if you feel like you’re being … held back … by, just, geography—”

  “No,” she interjected immediately, definitively, soft but stern. “No, Leo, no. That’s … a part of it, but it isn’t all of it. It’s more the first part, about defining who I am—really knowing who I am. The LA thing, it’s part of the same thing, part of the same whole. This is something that I have to do. I have to go.”

  “This feels so abrupt,” I said. “This comes from nowhere; this is—what are you doing?”

  She was throwing open the closet doors, stuffing loose fistfuls of clothing into a suitcase.

  “Fiona,” I said again, still fastened hard to the bed, “where are you going?”

  “Los Angeles,” she answered through new tears, sealing up her case and charging for the door.

  “But tonight,” I said, “Fiona, where are you going right now? Why are you doing this? Why are you leaving right now?”

  She stood in the doorway, facing away, frozen for a moment apart from one thin hand sliding down the frame, preserving a last image (an image of leaving; an image of being gone) I could pursue for all time. Something, I thought then, gazing after her, and gazing after tonight—something to remember her by.

  “I have to go,” she said, and walked plainly away.

  “Fiona, where?” I shouted after her, “Where can I find you? Fiona, where can I find you if I need to find you? Where can—Fiona, we need to talk. We’re going to need to … I need to know how to find you, and we need to talk. Fiona! What about your things? What about all of our stuff? You just have your clothes, Fiona—what about all of our things here?”

  “The rest is yours,” she said, and shut behind her the frail door to our home.

  I mushed the icy, stupefied dogs of my body into motion, and ran to the open window overlooking the city below. I peered through it, but there was not a trace of light: the dawn hadn’t broken after all; I’d only been adjusting to the darkness in the room. I couldn’t find her on the street below. And so I called out to her: “Fiona!” Again, nothing: “Fiona!”

  I heard a car door open; it didn’t pull up, it had already been there, waiting. But what kind of cab would—

  “I’m sorry!” she yelled up at me. “Leo, I’m just so sorry.”

  And everything stopped for me all at once. I hardly heard the words. Headlights burst open the oil-black girdle of the night, and a moment later she was gone.

  FOUR

  MICHAEL TIEGS WAS BORN IN CAIRO, GEORGIA in the summer of 1976. His father, Barton Tiegs, was an occasional mechanic who killed himself by drinking a fifth of whiskey and driving his Chevelle into a brick wall three weeks after his only child turned four. Michael’s mother, Cara Bonner Tiegs, raised him until her own death from lung cancer in 1990, at which point Michael went to live with his father’s sister, a state employee named June Jones, two towns over. That same fall, he was arrested for the first time and charged with misdemeanor theft for stealing bicycles; he logged one hundred hours of community service and was placed on six months’ juvenile probation.

  High school proved, perhaps predictably, to be difficult for Michael. He was undoubtedly one of the most skilled baseball players in the county, and one of its worst students to boot. He failed two courses as a sophomore—the same year he went 15-1 with a 2.06 ERA for the Pelham High Hornets—and was expelled from summer school as a formality after failing to attend a single session. At seventeen, he robbed a convenience store with a kitchen knife, a crime for which he spent the next three years in state prison after pleading guilty as an adult to a lesser offense. He entered a work release program at twenty; he spent his weekends living at a halfway house. On weekdays he mopped floors and bussed dishes at Harmon’s Bar & Grill, and every Thursday night he had dinner at June Jones’s house with her husband Tom and their three teenage children.

  By 1999, Michael had moved into an apartment of his own in the nearby city of Albany, fully emancipated from state custody for the first time in five years. His girlfriend, Therese Calley, was a former teen meth addict whom he had met in the halfway house; she’d been clean for eighteen months, and operated the fryer at a fast-food restaurant inside a terminal of the local Greyhound station. Therese had been arrested on three occasions by the time she was eighteen: twice for possession of a controlled substance, and once for solicitation. She moved in with Michael in March 2000, and the two cohabitated in relative post-custodial bliss for the next seven months.

  At 5:35 on the morning of October 21, Therese stepped onto the 86 bus that brought her to work each day. Michael either did or did not wake up to his alarm at 6:30, the hour at which the account of the condemned departs from the ultimate findings of the court. According to the state’s narrative, Michael woke as usual, boarded the 65 northbound bus rather than the southbound 46 which typically brought him to his job at Harmon’s, and got off three blocks from the home of John Jasper, a thirty-eight-year-old substance abuse counselor formerly employed by the Willow Creek Resource Center, the same halfway house where Michael and Therese had first met four years prior. Suspicious that John and Therese were romantically involved, Michael knocked on the front door of the Jasper residence at or around 7:15. He was let in by John, whom he then shot three times in the chest with an unlicensed Smith & Wesson .22 LR Rimfire handgun, which was later found in John’s kitchen trashcan with its serial number scratched off. Michael walked immediately back to the bus stop, switched over to the 46 near his own home, and arrived at work eighty-six minutes late.

  According to Michael’s narrative, he slept through his alarm that morning, waking at 7:55. He placed a call to Donna Viers, his shift manager at Harmon’s, at 8:09, informing her that he had overslept and would be running late; Viers’s testimony and the introduction of phone records into evidence confirm this. He took the 46 to work, completed the remaining eight hours and thirty-four minutes of his shift, and remained at Harmon’s to drink Bud Lights until 7:30 in the evening. He took the 46 back home, and was not aware of John Jasper’s death until two county officers arrived the next day to question him.

  Two days later, Michael Tiegs was taken into custody and charged with malice murder. At trial, the richer story comes out in earnest: roguish Jasper therapes his addled patients and sleeps with
the junkiest lady-junky from each successive group session. Those early salad days of the Tiegs-Calley romance were marked by admissible jealousies—Michael saw the lech in counselor John, and waxed feverishly about his desire to see him dead on more than one occasion right there in the personal journal provided to him by the administrators of the halfway house for the exact purpose of recording just such feelings (post-discovery, that private journal would be renamed “State Exhibit C”). Teary Therese fields questions in the courtroom on behalf of her lover—the actual word used nine separate times by two attorneys plus the judge: “lover”—but can’t account for Michael’s whereabouts on the death morning, can’t account for his propensity to rage, can’t so much as recall whether she’d ever seen her boyfriend of more than four years in the company of a firearm. The appointed defender is unbelievably bad, asking all the wrong questions and planting every fruitless seed. The driver of the northbound bus to Guilty identifies Tiegs as an unequivocally present passenger, while the driver of the southbound bus to Not Guilty doesn’t recognize the man at all, despite the fact that Tiegs had ridden the 46 twice per day, six days per week for almost two years. The whole thing—trial to verdict to sentence—takes only two weeks.

  From the Albany Herald, 6 June 2002:

  ALBANY—Convicted murderer Michael Robert Tiegs was sentenced to death on Thursday by a Dougherty County Superior Court jury.

  Tiegs, 25, showed little emotion as Judge Paul Cousins read the sentence aloud. He had been convicted by the same twelve-member jury last Friday for killing his former therapist, John Jasper, in Jasper’s Lydon Street home nearly two years ago.

  Tiegs was sentenced to death on one count of malice murder, and will be transferred to death row pending an automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court required by Georgia law in death penalty cases.

  The victim’s parents, Hank and Nancy Jasper, as well as his sister, Corinne Fleming, were greeted with hugs by the many friends and relatives who filled the courtroom. Tiegs’s girlfriend, Therese Calley, declined to speak with reporters following the verdict. Calley had testified on behalf of Tiegs during his trial.

  Dougherty County District Attorney Janine Huff called the verdict “fitting, given the clearly premeditated nature of the crime.”

  “I think what we have here is a good instance of the system working,” Huff added. “Michael Tiegs committed an act of cold-blooded murder, and the Jasper family can finally rest knowing that justice will be done.”

  Tiegs, who pled not guilty at trial, vigorously contested his role in Jasper’s death. His appeal is likely to be set for this winter at the state supreme court in Atlanta.

  Ten years and three failed appeals go by, and the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison visiting area looks sterile but smells quite like a thousand pre-packaged sandwiches.

  “Hello, Michael? Good morning, Michael. We’re the attorneys from the New Salem Institute who’ve been assigned to come … meet you, and speak to you about your case. My name is Rachel, and this—”

  “Ms. Costa,” said Michael Tiegs. “Mr. Brice.”

  “That’s right. We’re your new lawyers, Michael. We’re here to make sure that your claims of innocence are fully and fairly heard.”

  He hadn’t looked up until just then, and his eyes were enormous whey spheres—feverish, bold, voltaic eyes, eyes that could only reasonably belong to an addict or a mystic.

  “My dear sweet sister in Christ,” he said, meticulously wringing two spotted hands against the front of his hoary tangelo jumpsuit. “My dear sweet brother in Christ.”

  * * *

  I spent much of the second half of the year Fiona left me sifting through artifacts. She and I used to write letters to each other—real ones, of the handwritten, licked-envelope variety—and stash them sneakily in our shared mailbox. The rule was: we never mentioned to each other that the letters existed; they were their own, entirely separate discourse, like some mad parallel relationship that was happening between two other versions of our two selves. There was no money then, and on birthdays we always gifted food, wrote poems, or staged elaborate public acts of self-humiliation for the other’s entertainment. I put everything in a shoebox, because that’s what they did in movies; shuffling through it now was my cruel, private ritual: new shrapnel each and every night—new salt for old wounds.

  And here they all were. Affixed to a crudely drawn T. merula and dated April 13:

  “Thirteen Other Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” written by Fiona Haeberle for Leonard Brice on the Occasion of His Twenty-Fourth Birthday

  I

  It was evening all afternoon.

  It was snowing

  And it was going to snow.

  I read my copy of Blackbird Enthusiast.

  II

  When the blackbird returned,

  I had taped a sign to my window:

  Free insects and berries inside.

  III

  Among the forest trees,

  I dressed up like a different blackbird

  And chilled out near the real blackbird’s nest.

  IV

  In the haggard city square,

  I paid a child to draw

  A picture

  Of

  A blackbird for me.

  V

  Icicles filled the long window

  With barbaric glass.

  I filled the blackbird’s nest

  With glue.

  VI

  O thin men of Haddam,

  Poke a pinhole in a shoebox.

  Point it at the blackbird.

  VII

  He rode over Connecticut

  In a glass coach,

  Until he reached

  The Junior Varsity Zoo.

  VIII

  Blackbird singing in the dead of night,

  I left it a ticket to see Wilco

  And then I also showed up.

  IX

  As the blackbird flew,

  I took a picture of it with my cell phone.

  X

  In the gloaming light,

  I set up

  An elaborate series

  Of mirrors near the blackbird’s tree.

  XI

  I ordered a Discovery Channel

  Special about blackbirds

  Off the Internet.

  XII

  The river flowed.

  I challenged the blackbird

  To a staring contest.

  XIII

  Special

  Blackbird goggles.

  The many dripping letters I kept clipped and sorted by author and date; she took nothing with her when she left, so everything Ours was suddenly all mine. There were several dozen of these sick little ghosts at home in the box, rubber-bound together and meekly decomposing. I poured over them, a heartbroken archaeologist, manhandling each fossil, demanding they squeal.

  Dear Leo,

  I happened upon this (oh so appropriate) reading in your birthday present from me, which by the way I’m borrowing back from you for a little while. Check it: “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up—the harsh tide of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.” That’s Abigail Adams writing to John Adams—so third wave! I hope we get to love each other forever the way they did, in a full and difficult way. And if you ever cross me, I will foment the shit out of a rebellion. Won’t you be my Dearest Friend?

&
nbsp; With all my bursting love,

  Fiona

  Dear Leo,

  I can’t stop thinking about the mac & cheese at Declancy’s. Now that you’re back from class and reading this, will you come upstairs to our home? Will you take me to get that mac & cheese at Declancy’s?

  Your Dearest Friend,

  Fiona

  Dear Alvy,

  Happy Halloween (almost)! I’m getting into character for tomorrow night. I hope you’ve been working on your accent, because the last time I heard it you sounded like you were from Neptune instead of Coney Island. Do you remember last Halloween, when we were John Wilkes Booth and Abe Lincoln? I don’t care what anyone says, that was hilarious. Nobody understands us, huh? It’s okay, because we luff each other! You were SUCH a great Booth. See you in a couple of hours.

  La-di-da,

  Annie

  Dear Leo,

  This is a letter to say thank you for holding my hand on the way to the hospital yesterday, and for making me soup last night and for picking up ice cream today. I love you.