The Life of the World to Come (15 page)

I weaved through the thunderous crowd toward the front, beyond the yachty masses, beyond the orchestra pit. I kept a searching eye on the rows of my audience, but I couldn't find her; the famous faces were somehow unfamiliar. Once on stage, I snatched the trophy and began:

“Thank you! Thank you, Academy! Please! I want—”

“No!” shouted Wladislaw, loping up the steps. “He's not real!”

“Please!” I went on. “I want to tell you—”

“Hey!” barked Wladislaw, and he was irate, grabbing at my lapels, lunging for the statue. I stared out, searching, into the assemblage of stars.

“I want to tell—”

“He is not real!” blasted the superlative technical editor into the podium microphone. “I am Wladislaw Budziszewski!”

I struggled to reclaim my position, and overcame the smaller Wlad.

“You don't know that!” I bellowed to the crowd. “None of you know the animated technical whatever—”

“I am the real Wladislaw Budziszewski,” he yelped, his voice cracking.

“No!” I countered. “
I am the real
Vladishaw … Budin … owski.”

“Please! Stop this!” he called up from the ground. “You aren't real!”

“I am! I
am
real! I want—”

“No!”

“I'm looking for someone.”

“He's not real!”

“I'm looking for the actress, Fiona Fox—”

“You cannot do this!”

“Listen, everyone: I want to tell you a story.”

*   *   *

The trip from the Jackson Days Inn to the Georgia Department of Corrections death row facility goes like this: Rachel Costa knocks so quietly on the door to your room that you're not certain if anybody is there at all; you drive two-point-eight miles in a rented Nissan Sentra to the easterly end of town, and park in a gated lot designated for visitors to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison; you walk nearly two hundred yards from the lot to the guest entrance, where one of you marvels aloud at the fact, learned earlier, back in the car, that it is sixty-two degrees today in Georgia even though this is allegedly December; you hand photographic identification to a sturdy woman with a large gun, then proceed through a metal detector after placing your phone and keys into a gray plastic bin; you give your names and the name of the inmate you are visiting to a stern man in a brown suit, then also provide him with the same photographic identification you just displayed a moment ago; Rachel Costa hands her purse to a gray woman, grayer even than the plastic bin, who spirits it away into another room; everybody signs their name to a sheet of paper and dates it, and everybody gets a visitor badge to be displayed at all times; the two of you and a solitary guard walk together in silence down an impossibly long hallway and through two security doors; you enter a neon-lit room that has no need to be as large as it is—the only thing in it, apart from six folding chairs and one folding table, is the convicted murderer Michael Tiegs.

“How many are here?” Rachel asked the man in the brown suit on the occasion of our first visit.

“Sorry, ma'am?” he grumbled, hands folded palm-to-anti-palm behind his back like a sentinel.

“Inmates. How many inmates do you have in this facility?” she asked again. I figured she was only making small talk; we both knew the answer already.

“Ninety-eight men here, ma'am,” he replied, and pushed his lower lip up against the full length of his drooping Zapata mustache.

“They're all men?” I asked, frowning. I guess I felt like making small talk, too.

“The women are kept up at Metro State Prison,” he answered stiffly, “in Atlanta.”

We trundled past the man in the brown suit, past endless flecked ceiling tiles and caged lights, down the hall to meet Michael Tiegs.

“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 Tiegs. “Mr. Brice.”

He was thirty-six when we met him, and just impossibly gaunt. It was difficult to believe that this same man—now monkish and pale—was at one time in possession of a low-nineties fastball, the most feared arm in southern Georgia. His face was fixed in a state of lassitude, but those eyes: Christ, how they darted and swelled. He had the same hushful drawl as the man in the brown suit; words seemed to drip out of him like candle wax. Serene in his movements, he reminded me at once of a place I'd only read about: the Sea of Tranquility, on the moon. It's not a sea, per se, but rather a lunar mare—reflective, mysterious, salty, and completely placid, a basin beyond the reach of human interference.

What we learned that day in the neon-lit room: Tiegs had spent the past decade reading every book in the prison library save for the legal texts and contemporary American fiction. He found Jesus in 2008, and became what he called “a latinitaster—just basically, sorta like a petty scholar of church Latin.” Every night, he engaged in three hours of elaborate liturgical prayer. He had an eerie command of religious history, from Stonehenge and the life of Krishna to the Second Vatican Council. He demonstrated no special interest in the outcome of his case or the future of his life on Earth.

“You Jewish?” he asked me, less than twenty minutes after we'd met for the first time.

Here we go
.

“In fact, I am,” I said, braced curtly for my initiation into some lost strand of truly medieval prejudice.

“I guessed that from your name,” said Tiegs, now grinning. “I should've said more like, ‘my brother in the Vast Abrahamic Tradition,' I suppose. Leo is Leonard?”

“Yes. Leo is Leonard.”

“I knew a Leonard, back in grade school,” he went on. “That Leonard, though—he wasn't a Jew. But a lot of them are. Y'all know Leonard Cohen? Leonard Bernstein?”

“
You
know Leonard Bernstein?” asked Rachel, clearly incredulous but somehow not rude-sounding. I couldn't get over the way he said ‘Bernstein.' BURR-uhn-stay-uhn, the
uhns
brief, but there, the plosive
stay
ejected from his mouth like a wayward mosquito.

“I do, young sister. I even know Lenny Bruce—he was a Leonard too. And he was a Jew too, I'm pretty sure. I'm not entirely certain about that, now, but I'm pretty sure. I'm wondering now if either of y'all know the story of Mosheh ben Maimon.”

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.”