The Life of the World to Come (17 page)

“You stood right here in this kitchen and said, ‘Love is a planet,' Leo,” recalled Boots. “Felt like a real breakthrough moment.”

“I know,” I said.

“So it's disheartening to us,” Boots went on, “that you still won't let go of this notion—which you
admit
is fantasy—that your life is going to be meaningless without, like, some cosmic connection to ground you through future lives, or whatever the fuck.”

“No, I know, but—”

“No buts, Leo. Rachel is awesome, and you're about to blow it before it even begins. Stop soul-searching and live a life.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Love is a planet, Leo,” Emily repeated sweetly.

“I know,” I said.

“Not just any planet,” added Boots. “It's this one.”

They were right—of course they were right, but logic couldn't pierce my stupid heart, so I went to Sona for a contrarian opinion.

“Who even is this broad?” she asked.

“You've met her. A couple of times. Black hair, like yours. Rachel.”

“Hm. I don't think I've met her. Anyway, she sounds pretty unmemorable. You should drop her.”

“You think—”

“Yo, Leo, if you're not feeling it … drop her. She sounds terrible.”

“She's great, actually,” I responded. “She's thoughtful and generous—I actually really do like her. Or at least I think I could be capable of … liking her, of genuinely liking her, when the time is right, and we know each other better, and I have a little more capacity to really get to … be a person who could…”

“Okay, well, I don't believe you,” Sona answered.

“Why's that?”

“Because you're a huge sap, and, if this girl was really it for you, you'd be talking your standard nonsense about riding into the infinite future with her, not about how generous she is.”

She had something there. Affectionate feelings for Rachel aside, I didn't know how to love someone in the second way; I didn't want to know how.

Love may be a planet. It may be something ancoral, something firm and steady and muzzled by its own gravity. It may be snug. But what good is love if it isn't also unrestrained? If it isn't supernatural? What good is it if it doesn't course through space and time like a fucking rocket ship, blitzing Heaven and bewildering Earth, not terra firma but terra incognita, raining bright issles down upon the cozy planets below? What good is it if it
isn't
Heaven?

Fiona glowed with purpose on the campus theater's pearlescent screen. This was
The Nervous System: A Very Deep Film by Bettany Skiles
, the second day we met, and down here in the audience, in a memory, her knee grazed mine just barely. The spectators were pooled in her light—in her character's light, I mean—their hearts beating in time with Ours, and I saw her, too, in her own light. We all laughed with her when the moment was right; we all leaned in together when her performance called us near. When I melted back deep enough into the twill cushion of my seat, I could see both versions of her at once: a young woman ticking fatefully by my side for the moment, and a projection of a girl who could stay that way forever.

*   *   *

“Leo, when we send you off to Georgia, there's an unspoken rule that you come back with peaches,” chided Martha as I launched myself onto the cracked leather of her couch.

“Or peanuts,” added Peter Ausberry in his graveled baritone.

“Right,” said Martha. “Peaches or peanuts. We're disappointed in you.”

“I should've known,” I responded as sheepishly as one can with one's feet splayed on the coffee table.

“Damn right,” she said. “But you're flying back down there on Wednesday; you're gonna remedy this. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You're gonna score us some peaches. Okay? Or peanuts?”

“You bet.”

“So Leo,” Peter rumbled, “what are you thinking about Michael Tiegs? Any holes in the case? Any angles that might have been missed the first few times around?”

It was nearly December, and our first round of conversations with Michael had yielded nothing of jurisprudential value. Three phone calls placed to his court-appointed lawyer had revealed a certain staggering carelessness, but no likely grounds for a valid claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Rachel and I had spoken to county officials, amateur abolitionists, and the original arresting officers, all to no avail. The case against Tiegs, though short on witnesses or hard evidence, had been neatly prosecuted. Our only hope of saving him, Rachel and I agreed, was to determine Therese's role in the crime—and convince Michael to stop protecting her.

“He's not terribly forthcoming,” I said. “At least not with the kind of thing we're looking for. He seems … resigned, I guess, to his fate. No, not that: he seems almost … over it. He's easily the most nonchalant condemned person I'd ever expect to meet. I get the sense that Therese Calley is central to everything that happened, but she won't talk to us, and Tiegs refuses to say one bad thing about her. Rachel's sure that she's responsible for everything and that he's—that he went insane, or something, when he found religion, I guess, and that he's just sort of willingly martyred himself by covering for her. We have more digging we need to do, but so far nobody's cooperating. Not Therese, and certainly not Tiegs. And I'm not sure which is the bigger problem between the two of them.”

“Okay then,” said Peter. “You and Rachel should keep pushing on him. But you're going to need to figure out a way to connect with Therese Calley soon, uncover something valuable we can show to the court, or we'll have to drop it.”

“I know,” I said, and quite suddenly I formed a picture in my mind of the consequences if we didn't save him: Michael would be gone.

“Do you trust him?” Peter asked quickly, and, almost as an afterthought, “You and Rachel have been speaking with him for a little while now—do you think he's guilty?”

“I don't know,” I answered truthfully, surprised at myself. I hadn't even thought about it—about whether or not Tiegs actually pulled the trigger on John Jasper—not once since the moment I met him four weeks prior. I'd
talked
about it, to be sure, but I hadn't formed an opinion of my own.

“Okay,” said Martha, “you've got all your meetings set up for the next trip? You have everything you need from us?”

“I'm all set,” I replied.

“Good. You have four days down there, then if we get something new to work with, maybe more, alright? If not, then it's just one more quick trip after that to close out. We have complete faith in you, okay?”

“Yep.”

“Go to work.”

“I will.”

“Uhh, Leo,” she stammered. “I almost forgot, before we let you go, I have to ask, and I'm sorry to pry, even though I know you think this isn't appropriate or whatever—has there been any sort of progress with your co-counsel?”

“What, Rachel?”

“I just want to see how you're feeling—how you're recovering, okay?”

“Recovering?” I asked.

“From the … bad times. Let your work take your mind off of it, alright? And, like I said, Peter and I think, if you haven't asked Rachel out yet, that you should. Right?”

“I have nothing to do with this,” said Peter, solemnly peeling a tangerine in the corner chair. “This is a bad idea.”

“Don't be a grouch, Pete, okay?” responded Martha. “We're talking about young love here. Leo, have you put the moves on her, or what?”

“No moves,” I told my employers, two opposite poles, perfectly antipodal with respect to my love life. Martha leaning in. Peter in retrograde. “I have no moves to put on her at all.”

“Fine,” she said, “get out of here. I'm just looking out for your future, Leo, okay? Someday, you'll wise up.”

When I flew back to Georgia, I went alone; Rachel had been at her dad's place in Maryland and would meet me the next day for another round of interviews. Thoroughly disabled once more by the flight, I recuperated in my same, now familiar (blessedly low-altitude) twin bed in room 207 of the Jackson Days Inn. I thought about Rachel all night—why did smart people like Martha, Emily, and Boots so insist that we were fools not to pair off?

Yes, she had a rare calming effect on the humming heap of my nerves. She was dignified and generous, and would have made a wonderful queen had the era obliged. Her eyes: tranquil, tranquilizing. On me.

I fell asleep that way, shoes on, Rachel spaniolating my dreams with her black bangs and airy intonations. By the time she knocked, softly, on the door, I'd been out cold for almost twelve hours.

“Leo?” came her muffled song.

“I'm here! I'm up!” I called back. “I'm sorry, I … I fell asleep.”

“It's morning, Leo,” she said. “Everybody fell asleep.”

“I meant I didn't mean to fall asleep. Jesus, how are you here already? I'll be ready in a minute. Just—”

“Relax. It's cool. Keep your pants on, man. I just wanted to let you know I got in.”

“Okay,” I answered, now waking in earnest. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Take your time,” she said. “We've got a late lunch date we have to leave for in about an hour. Harmon's Bar & Grill. You, me, and the Joneses.”

I thanked her through the wall, and rose. The drive down to Harmon's was long and quiet. The whole way, something about Rachel seemed imperceptibly different—not troubling, just different. The feeling it gave me was the same feeling you get just before someone reveals to you, for the first time, that they are Canadian. Did this sensible woman have plans for me? Was a spark of something transcendent erupting from our little friction? Or was she another bit player in my life, a kindly distraction, confined to this Earth and to this moment alone? Whatever it was, this little hitch that could not be placed, it occupied my thoughts as I drove down I-75. It occupied me still as we swung wide the saloon-style doors at Harmon's, where (according to a prominently displayed sign) the drinks are strong but the bartender's stronger.

June and Tom Jones were already seated on the same side of a faded red booth, her glassy left hand resting laxly within his enormous, roughhewn right paw on the table's exact center. In her face, June was nearly as spare as her nephew: angular and forbidding, with pale eyes, and tired. Her jaw was clenched tight, and her shoulders jutted out like bluffs against the sea. Tom was a grizzled jumbo. Woolly gray hair gushed out of him, from bulbous ears and montiform eyebrows and a thick neck and the whole perimeter of his olive drab boonie hat. I wagered that the pair was separated by eighteen inches of height and maybe two hundred pounds, and, sitting together, they gave the distinct impression of a polar bear and his beloved icicle.

“You must be the lawyers,” warbled June as we made our acquaintance.

“Rachel and Leo,” I answered. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with us about Michael.”

“Don't think nothing of it,” she said, “though I'm not sure how very helpful we can be to you. We've talked to all kinds of lawyers before—none so young as you, if you'll pardon my taking notice—and we just say the same thing every time. Same thing we said to the police, to the judge, to the reporters back when they were still coming around.”

“We're sorry to ask you to go through it again,” Rachel offered, primly unfolding a paper napkin and smoothing it on her lap.

“Oh sweetheart!” June exclaimed, extending her skeletal free hand halfway toward us in a gesture, I supposed, of reassurance. “Anything we can do to help Michael, we will do. Anything at all. The thing is, is…”

And here she began to quiver.

“The thing is, we've just been such a long time now without hope. The lawyers, they've told us before how hard it was gonna be. How unlikely that things would come around. Of course, if there's anything we can do—but we know that we shouldn't have any expectations anymore,” she said, turning to meet her husband's placid eyes. “We've made our peace with it, I mean. I believe that maybe Michael has as well.”

We asked June about her knowledge of the crime and the case, and her jagged face lit up discussing Michael's younger days. So thoughtful; so smart. A little rambunctious in spurts. A good kid. They were certain he was going to be a ballplayer.

“And what about his girlfriend, Therese?” Rachel ventured once the better memories ran dry.

June's eyes at once fell cold.

“What about her?”

Each of the four of us tightened and shifted, such was the acid in her tone.

“Well,” proceeded Rachel, “she lived with Michael for seven months. They dated for years. She testified on his behalf at the original trial. And she was … around, with him, earlier in the morning on the day that John Jasper died.”

“Sweetheart,” June said sharply, “what do you want to know?”

“I guess I'm just curious why you haven't mentioned her—it seems as though she played such a big role in his life.”

June glanced at Tom, who glanced back with calm eyes.

“We don't care for her much,” she said with strenuous diplomacy. “She was the root, mind you—the root of all these problems that came upon Michael, you know. None of this would've happened if she hadn't shown up, and messed him all up, and messed all around, all—”

“June,” I said, halting her at parboil. She exhaled, cooled, and I asked: “Are you suggesting that you think that Therese was responsible for John Jasper's death?”

“I can't say,” she answered. “I just can't say. Well, now, what I can say is that she was absolutely responsible for getting Michael all wrapped up in it—that's for sure. Michael ain't never fired a gun in his whole life. His whole life; I know that he never did. His parents had guns around when they was around, but we never had guns around. Not in our home, no. But that man Jasper, he was shot with a gun a few times, and they found that gun in the trash can. Michael never even touched a gun—Therese, I know she had a gun before. I don't know what kind, but I know she did because I saw it with my own eyes; Tom saw it too.”