The Life of the World to Come (11 page)

“A venerable diplomat of unrivaled credentials is called upon once more by his country to serve. His name—”

“Darryl Strawberry,” said Boots.

“James Buchanan! Distinguished, experienced, wise. Alas, devoid of courage and foresight and some other fairly necessary things. In need of an advisor—a trusted voice who could impart upon him the dire consequences of inaction. Together, we could squash slavery and mitigate the losses of war. No Confederacy; no legacy of disunion or treason. I bet I could do it. I could fix it if I were there—if I had the time. That is my answer.”

“Are you done?” asked Fiona.

“Indeed I am,” I replied.

“Glad to hear it, Professor Dipshit,” she said, before planting a loud kiss on the side of my face. “So it's me now. And I choose: the future.”

“Well,” I said, “you definitely can't do that.”

“Of course I can!” she objected.

“Professor Dipshit is right,” called out Boots, now resting on his stomach and speaking directly into the floor. “It's against the rules to pick the future.”

“But I
made
the rules,” Fiona answered indignantly.

“But you said ‘history,'” countered Emily. “You said ‘at any time in history'—the future doesn't count. It hasn't happened yet, ergo it isn't history.”

“That's ridiculous!” Fiona declared. “Of course the future counts as history. It's part of time! It's on the timeline of, you know, existence. Who cares if we haven't been through it yet? It's on the timeline!”

“I'm not sure you can win this one,” I told my agitated love. “You've got five half-lawyers—which is basically two-and-a-half actual lawyers—who are interpreting history as to not include the future. Rebuttal?”

“Screw your legal bullshit; that's my rebuttal,” she said. “Tomorrow is just as much a part of history as yesterday. And if you weren't so wrapped up in textual interpretation—yeah, I know that term; I know ‘textual interpretation'—you'd all agree with me, because I am so very right about this.”

We went on drinking and talking and laughing then, and the night slipped into the past as seamlessly as any other. Later, when the future turned out to be history, just as she'd predicted, I returned to this conversation and got sad. And returning now, I am sad, and I will return again.

*   *   *

I've had eight nights I was sure would be the last of my life: two fleeting dementias, one lightning-strike headache, five fevers-you-don't-come-back-from. Eight nights, so I felt relatively relaxed when, on the night after the night that Fiona left, I accidentally swallowed a bay leaf. I thought perhaps that cooking would make me feel better; it was something we'd done together almost every night for several years, and I wanted to maintain whatever consistency I could. I wanted, I guess, to produce and consume the way that people do when they've not been hollowed out by fresh grief. Or maybe I didn't know what I wanted; it's possible that I was delirious. Either way, I cooked and I ate for hours without thinking—but a stray bay leaf was left behind, and before long I felt those crisp ridges start to tear at my throat. I thought I'd read it somewhere, but I wasn't certain—can a person left alone be killed by swallowing a bay leaf? Among herbs, they are the closest to paranoia or regret: lie down with them at night, and they will cut you open from the inside.

I called her four times on the day after she left me a nonsensical wreck, baying primal bays, like the very first hominid evolved enough to comprehend the meaning of his own death. Four times, and she never picked up, never called back, was never enough in existence to ping back my last desperate signals. God only knows what kind of messages I left—I don't remember what was said, and even if I did, I would spare you. The words didn't matter much anyway; there was nothing I could do to stop the war. Our breaking up went very badly for me.

In bed I thought about the coming change; I thought about what my life was going to be like now that she was gone, and also I thought about the bay leaf swimming within me. I sweat, and turned, and tracked the little threat as it skulked across my body. In time I leveled out, and brought the heaving evening to its logical meridian. I remember the strange dream I had that night, which was a dream of a family—two parents and an infant son—running from something awful in the dark. They swaddled their boy hard in a checkered blanket to keep him from screaming. They hid in outhouses from Kiev to Constantinople, and on a ship called the
Braga
I watched them sail to New York—I watched the whole flight, all in those few hours of hot and wretched sleep. This was a dream of my history, and I knew who they were; I knew who that boy would be. This was March 1923, and his daughter is my mother. I have his affection for chipmunks, the paperclip he used as a stickpin. He came into his new world that way: as a treasure, a morsel, a secret prize. I came into mine as an infidel, barking gin-soaked into Fiona's voicemail like a bay leaf, shivving indiscriminately at her insides, and for what? A little desired bitterness. A more thorough stewing. The next day, I woke up.

*   *   *

My mother's college roommate was a woman named Luz, a Colombian expat of deep intelligence and peerless magpiety. We'd always been close; I called her “aunt” growing up, and she was the only person who got to call me “Lenny.” Luz was a businesswoman of some renown—the CFO of a large multinational corporation—and her work took her frequently from her apartment in New York to the most distant centers of commerce for long stretches of time. Ten years widowed, and with her children now in graduate school, she found herself away more and more. Her home on the Upper West Side was opulent, expensive, and empty.

By early October, more than two months after Fiona and I dissolved, my apartment had still stubbornly refused to stop being The Place Where We Used to Live. The premises were littered with toxic artifacts, and crippling relics of her time there were strewn about everywhere like dead leaves. I couldn't stop the infestation of memories; I had to escape. So I called Luz.

“Lenny!
Mi querido!
My little lawyer! Oh, Lenny, it's been far too long! I'd force you to come over for dinner, but—ugh—sweetheart, I am in Houston, Texas, tonight. Oh, and Lenny, I heard from someone—I'm not going to say who, but it was your mother, and she's very worried about you Lenny, so you need to call your mother more because you know how she worries about you—she told me that your strange little girlfriend ran away with some
idiota
. She didn't say
idiota
—I say that. She said
schmuck
. Lenny! Sweetie! Tell me how you are doing?”

I tried to do just that, making use of the still-evolving vocabulary I'd been developing in order to communicate with the outside world: the wistfully encouraging vocabulary of consolation, which was bullshit. Aunt Luz listened expressively, and spoke at length about fleeting love and the fickle nature of women. She insisted that I stay in her apartment, from which she would be absent for seven months at least, and refused my repeated offers of rent. There was a catch, though:

“Oh, Lenny! This is fate—it's
kismet
, your mother would say. We can help each other. Have you met Lita? My mother, Lita? No, you probably haven't, have you—not since you were a little boy. She is eighty-eight years old, but Lenny, she is very much alive, very active, a very sharp lady is my mother. Anyway, she lives there now—she got sick of Florida and she wanted to be close to her daughters and her granddaughters, so she just moved into one of the bedrooms in my place. She doesn't need anybody taking care of her, Lenny, and even if she did that wouldn't be a job for you, and anyway my sisters are all close by. So, no, I will not accept any money from you,
mi querido
—but Lita, my mother, she could use some help with one thing only. She has a dog.”

I moved into Luz's penthouse the next week, and sublet my squalid Brooklyn digs to a high school friend of Sona's. My new place was well-kept and womby, and Luz had left no fewer than thirty-five post-it notes clinging to various surfaces and appliances instructing me on everything from towel basics to the creation of ice cubes. A family of six could have lived there comfortably—luxuriously, even—but kismet insisted that the unlikely trio of Lita, the dog, and I suffice.

I actually met the dog before I met Lita: a middle-aged miniature schnauzer named Rafael Uribe Uribe, after the famous Colombian politician and general. He was coy and defensive, with the ragged beard of a graying billy goat and the fusty odor of another, much deader billy goat. The hircine pooch was endowed with a boundless supply of nervous energy; it was clear to me from the outset that he was riddled with the full compendium of dog anxieties, and all day long his skittish paw-nails tapped out their endless retreats on the hardwood floor. Lita was out when I first came in, so my introduction to Rafael was thus: peaceable palms and human words of calm on the one hand, feverish barking and a botched, near-cartoonish scampering away on the other. Could he smell my sadness? I couldn't know. In time we would be friends.

Lita had a majestic little thatch of chromic hair, and a face warmed and thickened by many hot suns. She was sweet, wise, and humble, the very picture of grandmaternity. At least that's what I imagined she was like—for all I knew, she could have been gently flinging curse words at me from behind those kind old earthen eyes. As it happened, she did not appear to speak a single word of English, and my Spanish was likewise limited to an unhelpful handful of clunky, phonetic greetings. For reasons now obscure to me, I'd chosen to take French in school, the result of which was this initial exchange on Lita's return from her morning walk that first day:

Me, unloading cooking supplies from a duffel bag: “Oh! Hi! You must be Lita. Luz—your daughter, she … she must have told you I'd be moving in today. Right?”

Lita, smiling indifferently: “Hola. Sí, sí.”

Me, thinking perhaps that she understood: “Oh, great. It's wonderful to meet you—or, I guess, we met a long time ago, when I was very young. I'm Leo. Lenny? Do you … uh, we met, I think, once before, when I was very …
poquito
.”

Lita, creaking downward to rest one ancient, tremulous hand upon the head of Rafael Uribe Uribe: “Sí, sí. Hola, mi perro hermoso. Tranquilo, mi pequeño amor. Tienes hambre, mi dulce?”

Me, beginning to appreciate the situation: “Oh. I don't … this is going to be funny, because I don't actually … speak any Spanish at all. This is going to be difficult, huh?! Heh. Very … diff … i … cile.
No habla español,
I'm afraid.
De nada
.”

Lita, still whispering only to the dog: “Desayunamos, Rafi. Ven conmigo, mi amor.”

And she shuffled away with another far off smile, her cantering dog in tow.

 

FIVE

M
ITHRIDATES
VI
BECAME THE RULER OF
A
RMENIA
Minor when his father, Mithridates V, was assassinated one hundred and twenty years before the birth of Christ. The son was only fourteen at the time, a boy king, and for nearly six decades he bedeviled the Roman Empire from his Turkish perch. Deeply and understandably paranoid regarding assassinations, Mithridates the younger began his reign by decamping to the wilderness for seven years—the story goes that the duration of this period was spent gathering and consuming an unholy sampler comprised of every poisonous bit of flora yet known upon the Earth.

Scholars and poets have sung the praises of his antidote, of
Antidotum Mithridaticum
, for more than two millennia. You start with a scintilla, and the venom hardly hurts you. You build from there, quite slowly, and the more you ingest the stronger your resistance becomes. As things move along, you become sick, but not deadly so. Your resistance blooms into a tolerance, which in turn blooms into full immunity; as with anything, you eventually become indifferent to the awful thing with which you've filled yourself.

The vaccinated king came back to civilization in the wake of his ordeal, ruling and being and waging battles unafraid of sly conspirators. He gave his name to the Mithridatic Wars: great skirmishes with the greatest generals of the old Roman Republic—Lucullus, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and the last of these was Pompey. Mithridates was a graying caudillo by the time Pompey reached the heart of his kingdom; faced with capture and the imminent loss of his realm, he opted to kill himself rather than endure the torture of defeat. Frantically, he partook of every morsel of poison he could find. He was foiled, of course, by his own juvenilia: the defenses he so deliberately cultivated as a young man kept him from dying in the moment he finally wanted all that arsenic, all that wolfsbane, all that snakeroot and sumac, all that jimson and jequirity, that columbine, that corn cockle, that foxglove, larkspur, nightshade, that hellebore and hemlock to take root. He was required to keep living.

It was early November, and despite my failure to overcome the things I had been feeling, I too was required to keep living. There were markers resembling progress, of course: my friends no longer had to actively watch out for me, and the feeling among them—among myself, too—was that my stark sadness had receded from the existentially dangerous to the merely pitiful. By then, I'd gone so far as to let Boots set me up on a series of whiskey-dates with righteous young women he knew from his past life in the music scene; though none of them ultimately stuck, several dug my downcast mind enough to linger for a few nonconsecutive days. They took shifts helping vainly to prop up the rusted little shanty of my love: Carina, the singer, who wished only to live each hour of each day rapt with the ceaseless wonder of the universe (terms to be defined later); Kait, formerly a ticket-girl at The Broken Promise Rhythm & Blues Club, who could pickle almost anything and who signed her e-mails “with metta, k”; Marissa, the bassist-turned-PhD-candidate, who told fascinating stories at a high and hearty level; Courtney, another bassist, who mostly wanted to fight about which of us had been more profoundly screwed up by their ex, and who left when I won. Nobody wasn't sweet in their way—it was I who failed each time to see them, in a future tense, as something meatier than Anonymous Woman #7 in the end credits of my life: a bastard way to conduct one's conduct.