The Life of the World to Come (10 page)

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?

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.

YDF,

Fiona

Fee,

It's been sixteen days since you left home now. Sixteen days: that's even a little bit longer than Sinéad O'Connor sang about in “Nothing Compares 2 U,” for fuck's sake. I don't know where you are with any sort of certainty, but I guess, if what you said was true, then I guess it's Los Angeles. So, I've been thinking lately about what it's going to be like, these next fifty years without you. I've been thinking about death again, too, and I'm shaking like a child—why did it have to be this one? Why were we born into a world where such big things can go wrong? You know? We could have been born into anything and not known any better: same people, no death. Same trees, no fears. No horses, or maybe everything is a horse. You're there, but I never was, or the reverse. That's the thing—you can be born into anything at all. You just show up on the first day, and those are the rules of the world: proper number of horses and trees, of you and me, various laws concerning gravity, motion, biology, and time, whole preexisting histories involving endless generations of others who have already been here and gone. So why did it have to be this one? I bring this up because what I really need here is a world where I can make it be untrue that you've gone away. How many tries do you suppose that takes, all told? How many billions of planets will I have to wait for you to change your mind? Just please listen: I get that being you wasn't easy; I know how much it took out of you just being the way you were. I know that better than anyone ever will. But also, I know this—I know that the things that came with that difficulty are what made you great, once. You weren't supposed to be simple, Fiona, and you weren't supposed to be easy. You were complicated in a rare and wonderful way. And you may think what you're doing now is something like growing up, but I think you know better. I think you know it's just giving up. I think you gave up on Fiona Haeberle. I believed in her more than you could have known, and there were times when I was the only one. That's what really destroyed me, I think, more than you … going away, or whatever. Leaving. I had faith in the thing we made; I had faith in Our thing. And when your faith is, I don't know, predeceased, I guess, by the thing you have faith in, well … it is really quite hard to come back from that. Do you understand, Fiona? You were the best person I ever met, and I wanted to spend the entirety of my only life growing up with you. Now you're one of them, one of those other people, and I'm going to grow up alone. And I still—I still—I still believe that I'll always be in love with you in some way, even far down that road, and when the feeling becomes fainter, when I recognize it only as a familiar sweetness in the air I breathe in and out every day, it will be softer but no less significant to me. It will linger the way I now realize it has been lingering there for years, waiting for an explanation that finally came to me on the night we met. Do you remember that awful party? For forty short/long months, every portion of me has been whispering your name and gesturing frantically like a weathervane toward you. Is that sappy enough to be silly? I cannot believe you've gone.

Your Dearest Friend,

Leo [undelivered of course]

I was blown open when she left—blown open, and I couldn't get closed. Everybody knows that, when you're talking about a person, open things can get infected and closed things cannot. That's basic medical science. And I lay there, open, taking in all the world's bacteria, all the atomic details, every microscopic fact let loose to putrefy my self.

It was them, of course; it was they: Fiona and Mark Renard in horrible concert. It was Theirs and not Ours that, since spring, had ruled the Earth.
Mercy General
had in fact been canceled, and the characters played by the two of them had in fact been killed in that boating accident—that was all true, and that was all known. But it was no accident, no: Mark wanted out of his contract; he demanded that they die. He killed her. It wasn't the harbormaster at all. She must have wanted to go.

She must have wanted to go because they were involved with each other. An integrated item, to borrow a phrase. I hadn't seen the signs at the time, so I went back and planted them in my memory: the frequency of mention, the constant protestations concerning Mark's intellect and talent, the late nights on set, and the distance towards the end, while I was, for once, distracted by my legal education. I never received my moment of j'accusatory revelation, my chance to rip away the curtains or the mask. My cathartic confrontation not forthcoming, I had to make do with a set of sputtering assumptions: loose rumors, drips and drabs. I resented Fiona for not having the decency to let me find out, and be the one empowered to tear Our world apart in righteous sadness.

A couple of months after the cold facts set in, I bumped into one of Fiona's actress friends, Alice Gerson, near my building, and she displayed for my benefit the scrunched, cock-headed, treacly-sad rendition of “Hey … how're you holding up, man?” that can only truly be served up by a generally (but not specifically) compassionate woman to a man she doesn't know well whom a friend of hers has cheated on.

I'd get my confirmation later on, seeing them born anew, living together in Los Angeles, on a television screen in November. This would be the news: Fiona Fox, the actress—she was rising. Mark Renard was tabbed to be the leading man in some new show.

Four days after Fiona left, I walked across the bridge to Manhattan, an island I'd tried almost religiously to avoid in the course of my Brooklyn years. I wandered that inglorious wen down to new-to-me sectors like a ghost, hip shop to hip shop, the King of Nothing, looking for a feeling in the callous faces of strangers, listening only for her brisk mezzo lilt among the crowd noises. How could I possibly be expected to listen to anything else? What was I supposed to find here when she's gone? Old books. Winter coats. Dishware. A new watch. Walking home, the sky was almost completely black. How many years until I'd be back, hitting on the shopgirls?

*   *   *

“What's the game?” asked Gracie from behind the echo chamber of her empty wine glass.

It was a winter night—our second year of law school—and the universe was fine.

“No game, sweetie,” Sona murmured with moony eyes. “I think Fiona here was asking a serious question. Right?”

“Oh, it's quite serious,” chimed Fiona from high atop the kitchen counter. “Quite serious indeed. Should we open another bottle?”

Gracie was perplexed, and also drunk.

“That was the game—should we open another bottle?” she asked.

“It isn't a game,” snapped Sona.

“Sorry! I meant: that was the question?”

Fiona slid down to join me on the loveseat, corkscrew in tow.

“The question,” she explained furtively, “was this: if you could live at any time in history, when would it be, and why?”

“Oh that old chestnut,” groaned Boots.

“It's like summer camp!” Grace added giddily. “You know? Everyone goes around and answers some random deep question before you fall asleep? This is how you really get to know people, you know.”

“How much wine did you have at summer camp?” I asked her as I plucked free the cork from our last four dollars' worth of red.

The study group had migrated from the William Burnham Woods Room of the law library to Our apartment, as it was wont to do in thirsty moments. Traditionally, it took just a couple of hours before we came to resemble the aftermath of a particularly devastating carbon monoxide leak—Boots glued to the hardwood, Emily, Sona, and Gracie sprawled out on the couch, Fiona and I sluggishly entwined on the loveseat—and this evening was no exception. Any pretense of legal education always yielded before long to Fiona's insistent whim: what verb is saddest? Would we rather be fish or birds? Which poet would we most like to box?

“Boots, you're first,” Fiona declared. “When are you going to live?”

“Good question,” he droned back from his spot on the floor. “But seriously folks. I'm going with 1977.”

“That's awfully specific,” said Emily.

“It's a no-brainer,” he replied. “You got
Station to Station
-era Bowie. You got The Clash just starting up. Jimmy Carter's still in the White House. I probably could've played drums for The Pretenders. It's everything you need. Uh, what else? Velcro, I think. Velcro's pretty popular. Pet rocks.”

“Bootsie,” said Sona, “I think you're supposed to pick a time when you weren't actually alive.”

“Good one,” he said.

“That was a joke about how old you are,” Sona clarified.

“We got it,” I assured her. “Boots is super old.”

“Emily's turn,” announced Fiona.

“If you insist, darling. Let's see … I think maybe I'll go to 1977 and make sure this one doesn't overdose on anything.”

Boots rolled over to object, then paused.

“That's probably smart,” he conceded.

“If not,” Emily continued, “then I'll go to Paris in the 1920s.”

“What was going on in Paris in the 1920s?” asked Gracie.

“Oh, lots of things. Theater and cinema and jazz. The Folies Bergere. Picasso and Matisse. Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Coco Chanel. It was an incredibly vibrant place and time, and I think, as long as we're free to pick here, I'd like to give it a try.”

“Okay,” slurred Grace. “That sounds lovely—I'm going to Paris in the 1920s too. Sona, are you coming with us? It's gonna be so … freaking vibrant.”

Sona's eyes bloomed open, and she craned her leaden arms back behind her head.

“Under no circumstances,” she deadpanned. “If I'm going to time travel, I'm going somewhere where I can take over the world, like a slightly thinner version of Cleopatra.”

“It isn't time travel!” fumed Fiona.

“Cleopatra didn't take over the world,” I pointed out.

“And how do you know how thin Cleopatra was?” asked Emily.

“Yeah!” Gracie shouted, a little too loudly. Startled by her own volume, she added in a self-conscious whisper, “you weren't there.”

Sona surveyed us, bewildered, before Fiona took the reins.

“It isn't time travel, Sona. You're just born somewhere new.”

“Okay.”

“It's an important distinction.”

“Okay,” Sona said evenly. “I will be a terrifying ruler at any time. Someplace warm, preferably. Has to be at least five centuries ago for it to work.”

This satisfied all.

“Your turn, honey,” Fiona said, boring a slim index finger into my left ear.

“Ow!” I yelped. “Stop being gross, please.”

She retracted, and I gave my answer.

“1857,” I announced proudly.

“Jesus Christ,” said Boots. “Not this Buchanan shit again.”

“A nation stands on the precipice of a bloody fracture.”

“Why are you the way you are?” inquired Sona.

“The whole of our American experiment poised either to collapse upon itself or survive by dint of a pyrrhic civil war.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Boots. “Shut the fuck up.”