The Life of the World to Come (16 page)

“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.

*   *   *

After a seemingly endless ten-day stretch of inscrutable dialogues with Michael, of meetings with state officials and interviews with law enforcement personnel and sessions with Rachel comparing our notes over coffees, after consecutive nights of hopefully curative sex, I returned to New York and the lesser prison of my own thoughts. Outdoors, Manhattan remained an indecipherable zoo to me, a sprawling noise machine I lacked the will to appreciate. My domestic life, however, began to grow vaguely charming; as the trilemma of our respective language barriers melted away, a strange normalcy arose between Lita, Rafael Uribe Uribe, and myself. Our routine was simple enough: Lita, fixed to her rocking chair in the corner of the immense living room, would nod sympathetically as I aired professional and existential grievances in what could charitably be described as something just south of a grotesquely mangled Spanglish. After graciously enduring my noun supply, she would nod still, and whisper all the while loving paragraphs I'd never understand to Rafi. We all learned to trust and to nod. Lita spoke frequently, but never to me (except in the form of mellow holas of salutation and response). Rafi stopped barking on my entrances. We became a sort of weird, hieroglyphic brood—unable to communicate, but able to be content with our respective situations.

Things weren't so different with Rachel, actually; in the two weeks that bridged our first and second trips to Georgia, we'd made a cautious effort to further the scope and significance of our romance-like activities, but there was unmissable static in the connection. We managed, somehow, to grow in our distance despite an increasingly close proximity. At times, we seemed like strangers approaching each other from opposite ends of a long hallway. To avoid the collision, one veers left while the other goes right—“excuse me,” you say, politely, but then you both correct course. So now one veers right while the other goes left—“whoops, haha,” she says, and you smile sheepishly, so eager to defer, and the god-awful dance continues. My left, her right, nearly bumping into the unfamiliar mirror of the one you're approaching, or is it she approaching you? So it goes: the affable incongruity, the smiley failure of your most basic instincts to align, the protection of knowing that you'll never really touch.

I searched every conversation for the key to some higher meaning in our affair, but invariably the thought struck me: was there no celestial spark between us? Was she merely smart, kind, and pretty? I brought this to the attention of Boots and Emily, whom I supposed knew more about contentment than anybody else in New York.

“You need to give it time,” one or both of them told me. “Time to grow; time to develop. It's not magic, Leo. These things don't happen right away.”

“It happened right away with Fiona,” I countered. “I felt it: that thing, you know, that signifying thing that invades your bloodstream and focuses you like nothing else. It
was
magic, with her. And it's more than a little concerning that I don't feel that with Rachel.”

“You are a child,” said Boots, one hand on the incorruptible spine of the smart cookie he loved, another drumming absently on the armrest.

“Leo,” added Emily, “we've talked about this. That feeling fades away—it isn't the same thing as love. Remember? That Fiona feeling was just a shooting star? And real love is—what was it? A planet. Love is a planet. You said that.”