The Life of the World to Come

by Dan Cluchey

  I looked over at Rachel, who said mostly everything with her eyes.

  “I think that we don’t,” I said.

  “I’m surprised you don’t. Mosheh ben Maimon was called Maimonides, and he was pretty much basically like the most important Jewish philosopher in history. He was a jurist, of sorts. A man of unmatched wisdom in his own time. Maimonides, well, he created the thirteen principles of faith—basically, it’s pretty much like everything you need to be a Jew. He’d be a lawyer, like y’all are, if he lived today … course, he don’t.”

  “I’m afraid you’re stuck with us,” said Rachel gently.

  “You Catholic?” Tiegs asked her, grinning again.

  “Agnostic,” she replied, adding quickly: “but, yes, Michael, I was raised Catholic for a little while.”

  “I thought that from your name, too—from your last name—and from your complexion. But you ain’t even Catholic after all, are you now? So I guess it’d be more appropriate for me to say, ‘my sister in Healthy Skepticism.’”

  Rachel allowed a warm smile, and Tiegs chuckled in turn.

  “Michael,” she began, “you seem to be extraordinarily well-educated—”

  “You mean for a Christian?”

  “No, of course—”

  “For a convicted killer?”

  “No—”

  “Oh, you mean just for a Georgia boy, then?”

  “I meant for a person who dropped out of high school,” said Rachel, her whole body stiffened by the still-smiling Tiegs. I swore he liked us already.

  “Well, that’s certainly a fair enough description. I wasn’t ever much for school. I like to read here, though—lucky enough, too, in’smuch as there ain’t a thing else to do. In school, they never really taught the sorts of things that grab my interest.”

  “And what is it that grabs your interest?” I asked. “Religious studies?”

  “Not as such, I’d say, but the heap of ecumenical literature is part and parcel. I’m interested in death.”

  “Death?” I echoed back.

  “Death, like the row you’re on, ma’am and sir. Death, like the inevitable ceasing of all you’ve ever known or cared for in this world. I suppose I started to think about it, oh, ’bout the time when it became the next big thing for me. ’Bout then.”

  “Well,” Rachel added, “we’re here to see if we can stop that from being the case.”

  “Yep, yep, yep; the case, the case,” mumbled Tiegs. “That’s why y’all’ve come here, after all.”

  “It’s…” Rachel started, “it’s why we’re here, yes. We’ve been over your case history—all of the appeals, the conviction—everything. And, Michael, we have reason to believe that we might be able to mount a successful effort that could spare your life. But we need to know—”

  “Y’all need to know!” he shouted abruptly. “Y’all need to know … I know what y’all need to know, Sister Rachel, despite my apparently discomfiting dearth of higher education—you like that? My discomfiting dearth!—despite all that, I am wisened up enough to understand that y’all can’t mount so much as a dead horse, never mind a court appeal, if I ain’t cooperating in the efforts. Ain’t that right?”

  Michael’s lips peeled back into a ludicrous grin before quavering into a grim chortle.

  “So are you?” Rachel asked, unsteadied by the gruesome enigma before us.

  “We can talk,” he acquiesced, in a way that sounded as though talking was the very most that we could do.

  “Talk about the case?” queried a skeptical Rachel.

  “’Bout the case, sure,” he responded. “’Bout death. ’Bout anything you’d like.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so let’s talk.”

  “Just to be clear,” Rachel pressed, “Michael, if we’re going to get anywhere, we need to talk about the case—only the case, and the history behind it, about Therese and John Jasper, and everything like that. Death is … of interest to you, I understand, but we’re going to need to put that aside for now. Death is what we’re trying to avoid here.”

  “Stave it off though you might,” he said, adding, under his breath, “and I do appreciate the gesture,” before going on. “But it’ll find us—death’ll find us, all three—in time. All people agree on this, throughout the ages. Ain’t no mystery there. Mystery comes later.”

  We spoke with Tiegs for an hour that day, and let him know that we’d be back the next morning to run through the trial history of his case. Walking out, I asked him if he had any further questions for us.

  “Sure, I got a question. Are y’all as good at being lawyers as Maimonides?”

  “No sir,” I replied.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Brother Leo. You’re better than Maimonides,” he said, snickering to himself quietly. Two guards came in and began their fussy preparations for the short walk back to his cell.

  “How’s that, Michael?”

  “Maimonides ain’t here.”

  * * *

  Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock to a lawyer and a peasant in the spring of 1452, and everything that came later was just the obvious fruit of that bastard seed. That’s if you believe Dr. Freud, of course; the old pervert held up Leonardo as the paragon of sublimation (the most enviable of defense mechanisms, the one that lets you transform your damaged psyche into a machine that pumps out pristine works of art). Whether Leonardo was bent quite so fortuitously by the circumstances surrounding his birth is a debatable matter. What we know for certain is that he dreamed things so infinite that, more than five centuries later, he is remembered by the whole of the world.

  Vasari, the Florentine painter and father of art history, wrote of a curious routine of Leonardo’s: he used to purchase caged birds for the sole purpose of setting them free. Now, you don’t have to be Dr. Freud to discern some of the psychological ramifications of this particular habit (hell, you don’t have to be Dr. Phil): each of us faces moments when we cannot free ourselves—and perhaps because it’s the best we can do, some among us will move, then, to crack the cell of whatever captive animal is nearest.

  Michael Tiegs was a peculiar stray, and his neck was craned so high into the world of spiritual conjecture it was hard to know whether he was even capable of reeling his frantic brain back down to Earth. Our early meetings revealed a decided lack of interest in the more immediate of his two fates (the one to be administered by what he called “the ‘lowercase-J’ judge,” as opposed to “the ‘big-J’ Judge-on-High”); every question we posed on procedure, memory, or fact was met with a treatise on faith or an arcane historical parable. This exasperated us—Rachel most of all—on the first of our three trips to Georgia, as the final days leading up to the decision on his last-ditch appeal were already falling steadily away.

  “Can we talk about Therese today, Michael?” I implored him at the top of our third conversation. There was no dent in his composure, no registration of longing or remorse.

  “Well,” he proclaimed, “we can talk about anything y’all like, Brother Leo.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that. And today I’m hoping that the three of us can talk a little bit about Therese.”

  “Alright, fine then!” he chuckled. “Where’d you like me to start? Therese, she’s gotta be about five-foot-seven. She’s got dark brown hair and she’s bowlegged. She’s a good soul, too. A real good soul. That a good place to start?”

  “Michael,” Rachel gently interjected, “we spoke with the officers—the ones who originally arrested you—to verify the reports they’d written up and testified to at trial.”

  “I hope you gave ’em my regards,” he sang back dryly.

  “They’ve maintained from the beginning that when they first came to the house, they weren’t coming to question you.”

  “That right?”

  “They were coming to question her.”

  Michael didn’t flinch, but leaned slowly back in his folding chair, revolving his neck to stare straight up into the neon bulbs
. I detected a struggle in him: the source, I was sure, of his orphic sleight of hand. He had managed to place into perfect balance his two worlds—one of metal bars and cold concrete, the other of sublime, unknowable mist—and the struggle was to maintain that perfect equilibrium, that perfect serenity of never having to be anywhere full-time. As escape artistry went, it was something approaching genius. Rachel went on, delicately.

  “So I guess the first question is: how was it that they ended up arresting you and not Therese? Because the officers made it sound like you were not their first suspect.”

  “Well,” he uttered solemnly, “I was their last suspect. Ain’t that what matters?”

  “Michael—”

  “They came to have a word with her, sure,” he went on, still looking up to the lights. “They came, and they asked her some questions about the fella who got killed—that’d be John Jasper—they asked her some … questions, and … well, after a spell they asked me some questions, too.”

  For all of the natural ease with which he spoke of old philosophies, Michael bristled when asked to revisit memories of his own. When he did, he tightened, and instead of exhaling as usual, he blew out his breaths manually, like a child trying in vain to whistle. It was like a letting off of steam—the only crack in his tranquility I’d noticed.

  “And?” asked Rachel.

  “And. Well, I suppose they liked her answers more’n they liked mine.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They arrested me that morning, Sister Rachel. They took me away right then and there. Walked me on out. Into the cruiser. We sped off. They brought me down to the jail. Handcuffs, and all that.”

  “Michael,” Rachel prompted, “if you didn’t kill John Jasper, like you say, isn’t it possible that—I’m not saying this is what happened, Michael; all I’m saying is that isn’t it at least possible that—”

  “Therese, she’s a good soul,” Michael blankly interjected. “A real good soul. She never did do nothing wrong. Nope.”

  I glanced over at Rachel.

  “Well,” I started gingerly, haplessly drawing out the liquid sonorant ‘ell’ and the silence that followed long enough for my co-counsel to lose patience and finish the thought.

  “She did do some things wrong, Michael.”

  “Who, Therese? That don’t sound like her,” he snuffed, lurching his head back down to face us.

  “She did,” Rachel continued. “I mean, she was a … before you met her, Michael, she was a prostitute. She was arrested for solicitation—you know about that.”

  He blinked twice, then breathed in loudly, but his expression didn’t otherwise change.

  “Mary Magdalene,” he enunciated proudly. “Miss Mary Magda-leen.”

  “What about her?” I asked, though no amount of Hebrew school could have kept me from knowing what came next.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Brother Leo—she herself was thought to be a prostitute. Fact is, I’d say she’s pretty much basically the most famous prostitute of all time … course, there ain’t a single shred of scripture to back it up. Ugly lies and ugly rumors, if you ask me. It all goes back to this one homily, see? Back in maybe the sixth century, Pope Gregory, he declared that—”

  “Michael,” Rachel broke in.

  “Sister Rachel?” he replied innocently.

  “Why are you telling us about Mary Magdalene? What could Mary Magdalene have to do with your case, here in the present, non-Biblical times, Michael?” she asked calmly. These, it seemed, were fair questions.

  Michael only smiled: the civil grin of the prophet. He planted his elbows onto the folding table and leaned toward us intently, as though proximity might help make up for the gulfs in our comprehension.

  “Folks thought Mary Magadalene was a prostitute,” he explained slowly, oozing forth his personal logic. “And maybe she was, and maybe she weren’t. Point is, Mary Magdalene was a repentant sinner—a repentant sinner, and she walked with Jesus Christ.”

  He nodded at each of us to confirm that we followed, then went on.

  “Okay. Now, Therese … some people maybe say that she was a sinner too. What I’m saying is that, whatever it is she might’ve done, she is repentant. She is redeemed. She walks with Christ now. And that’s what it has to do with that. Do you understand?”

  I looked to Rachel in time to catch the finale of a heavy sigh.

  “I understand, Michael,” she said. “We understand. But we need you to understand that we are your lawyers. And because we’re lawyers, we live in a world where the things you’re talking about here don’t really factor in. If Therese was involved in John Jasper’s death, in any way at all, that’s something that matters to us a great deal. We talk about crimes here, not sins. We talk about exoneration, not repentance. Acquittal, not redemption. And if there’s any chance of us saving you here, you’re going to have to—”

  Michael and I had perked up on the same word, and he entered into a deep fit of laughter; though it came across as objectively maniacal, I understood immediately the source of his outburst.

  “Michael,” I said, trying to corral him, “what Rachel means is that our interest is in keeping you alive, and getting you out of prison. And to do that, we need to gather facts and information that could help—”

  “Save!” he roared, now beaming at us toothily. “It’s the two of y’all who are gonna be saving me? That’s just terrific, folks; that’s a treasure!”

  Rachel and I shifted nervously in our chairs as we waited out his giddy conniption.

  “You can throw away them shackles, boys!” he called out gleefully to the expressionless guards. “Lord have mercy; my saviors have arrived!”

  * * *

  James Buchanan was a goddamn amateur! Picture him, the turgid white old man, kissing greedily the wet hot mouth of pristine Rachel Costa—you can’t do it. She emits a little sound in the throes of that kiss, of my kiss, not his, not Buchanan’s, and in that sound lies sweetest mystery and purest faith. Because you see, James Buchanan was a failure, but I’ve not seen my country sliced in two. I’ve not failed. Not this time.

  At a lively chain restaurant on our first Thursday in Georgia, we had too much to drink; we laughed loudly for hours, and stumbled back to the hotel parking lot. Something happened and we were tangled against the warm metal flank of a stranger’s white sedan, my heretical hands pawing at her contours, her sleepy lips on mine, our bodies floundering together in the tawny dust of the American South.

  “It’s about fucking time,” she whispered into my chin.

  It is?

  I didn’t know what she’d meant, but the alcohol was emphatically more than enough for me to forget myself. I saw still the large, ghastly bears of memory that for months had preyed upon me, but they had lost their definition in the impenetrable blizzard of my head. For the first time, for a moment, I was free.

  We swayed, and stayed together through the night, buoyed by the blissful ivresse of eleven total mai tais. I thought of Fiona only twice the entire time. In the fog of the following morning, we surveyed each other like rival gunslingers, stoically sizing up one another’s intentions.

  “Oh hello,” she ventured warily at last, expressionless, still, and beautiful in the spangled glow of the new Georgian sun.

  “Hello,” I answered neutrally. Our noses were not more than six inches apart.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked, brushing truant strands of black hair back behind her ear.

  “I think … I might be a little hungover.”

  “I think I might be too.”

  A long moment passed between us. My saturated eyes limped around the room: flung cloth curtains to moseying ceiling fan to a shockingly decent painting of horses crossing a stream.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  “We have to go over the appeal motions this afternoon with—”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Oh.”

  “We slept together, dude,” she said, smiling just slightly
. I accidentally let a few seconds go by.

  “We sure did,” I answered idiotically. A sharp interciliary pain struck me like a lightning bolt, and I groaned.

  “That bad?”

  “No,” I stammered. “No! I just—”

  “I’m kidding. Was this so unexpected?”

  I wasn’t sure. I’d suspected for several long days now that Rachel could be good for me—nearly perfect, even—in a vacuum, in a world in which I was still qualified to entrust critical parts of myself to another’s care. Here she was, this warm and touchable future, this living opportunity to end the grim lacuna of my life and begin again. I reached out gracelessly to caress her skyward arm, and attempted to convince myself for at least a little while that it was Fiona who was dead. Not me.

  We ended up back in that same chain restaurant the next three nights in a row, and for three nights in a row we ended up back in room 207 of the Jackson Days Inn, enmeshed before the cloth curtains and the ceiling fan and the horses. I’m not proud to say that I was drunk on each of these occasions, but this was true. And it had nothing at all to do with Rachel, who, to her everlasting credit, was easy to be with and easy to know. She lacked nonsense and was largely unpeculiar. She was there. She wasn’t a capricious, inscrutable sphinx, like some people used to be. We spoke freely and enjoyed each other’s company, and for a necessary moment nothing was more significant than it was.

  And I lay awake those next three nights thinking: why did she go? And when at last I slept, I tried so hard to dream about Fiona again—but you can’t control your dreaming any more than you can control your time awake. Rachel was there now, waving and making herself large in that space. In my dreams, she was much too easy to find, this shiny epigone where one had gone before and gone away. I peered around corners in search of Fiona’s face, which in my dreams I couldn’t quite remember. I lost it, and it faded from my memory in the precise way that you might watch a bright heavy thing sink into the ocean (the instant the last glimmer goes, you find yourself staring at yourself). And the corners revealed nothing, and I woke up beside a pretty woman in the Jackson Days Inn every time.