The Life of the World to Come (2 page)

“Hmm,” she purred my way. “Have you tried enjoying it from another angle?”

“I'm sorry?”

“I mean, this party is rubbish, right? It's objectively a bad time. But appreciate it. From another angle. You're a senior, yes? So appreciate it for its novelty—pretty soon, we won't have this level of absurdity in our lives anymore. So you can enjoy this … this disaster … as, you know, a piece of pre-nostalgia. Something you can hold on to, later, when your life has turned stale.”

“I like that—I like ‘pre-nostalgia.' That's a solid angle.”

Her hair was some new color I wasn't familiar with from twenty-two years on Earth. She spoke with impeccable diction, and stood with perfect posture, and I was pulled quite quickly into her orbit.

“Look,” she said, “I know this whole scene is a little much, yeah? I get it. You're too cool for this? Or not cool enough? One of those options, maybe? But those people—that's your generation out there, rubbing up on each other.”

“My generation.”

“It's true!”

“My generation is really getting after it.”

“They're excitable,” she said, mock-thoughtfully pursing her entire face and commencing to absently crack each of her wispy fingers in turn.

“Every time I come to one of these, I like to pretend I'm an anthropologist,” I offered after a torturous beat threatened to end it all before it began.

“Aw. That's super weird, my new friend. A super weird thing to say to someone you've just met. Are you … are you like, some sort of a kind snob?”

Some sort of a kind snob. That's probably exactly what I am. Exactly. Fiona had recently finished her thesis too—
Thirteen Ways of Looking at ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:' Modernist Poetry, Modernist Movement
—and the fact that she was a double major in theater and dance led me inexplicably to bring up the not-dark but also not-flattering secret of my ineptitude in the latter discipline.

“You
can
not be that bad,” she challenged, but she was wrong: I certainly could.

“I am indeed that bad. I am the worst.”

“Ugh! Okay, that's it; we need to go dance right now.”

Fuck no
.

“No, thank you.”

“No, you have to come dance. It is decided.”

Don't do this to yourself. Don't do this to yourself
.

“I need to be really clear with you on this, okay?” I pleaded faux-desperately, but also actually desperately. “I need you to consider the consequences of your actions: if you make me dance, you won't ever want to talk to me again.”

“No?” she mouthed mockingly, wide-eyed, already pulling my sleeve toward its inescapable destiny of bewildered flailing.

“Not just that.
You'll
never dance again.”

“I love to dance,” she said.

“Not anymore. Not after you go through what you're about to go through if you make me dance. You can't un-see what you're about see. It'll destroy the whole medium for you.”

By then I had realized that I never had a chance, that she had checkmated me—when? Not when I brought up my failures as a dancer. Not when she brought up her successes as the same. No, it was much earlier. When she put on that devastating sundress? The day her parents met? Thirteen-point-seven-five billion years ago, when nothing at all erupted knowingly into everything there would be? I thought of what Joni Mitchell said about us being stardust, golden, billion-year-old carbon; calibrating even for the fact that I was now quite drunk, I decided then that it must be true, at least in Fiona's case. She was made up of prehistoric stars—that elegant electric dust—more obviously than anyone I'd ever met.

“Jesus. You weren't kidding,” said the stardust.

I looked like a monumental idiot, and the music tore through the sopping room like a frightened bird, and all night long she called me “Neil,” which is not my name. Just briefly then, in the humiliating haze, it occurred to me that I'd never cared enough to dance for someone up until this instant, not ever, and certainly not so suddenly. I am not a sudden person.

By chance, we met again the next day: Bettany Skiles, my natty and occasionally brilliant dorm-mate, was screening her thesis film—
The Nervous System: A Very Deep Film by Bettany Skiles
—in which aspiring actress Fiona portrayed someone's unlovable daughter, a gaunt and ghostly teenager stricken terminally by ennui.

“Leo,” I corrected her warmly when we nearly bumped into each other in the clinical-white foyer of the campus theater.

“If I sit with you, do you promise not to talk about the film or about me?”

This would prove to be the first of maybe ten thousand instances in which Fiona spoke to me as though we had been smack in the middle of some longer conversation, and I sensed this, I guess, and smiled.

“Of course you can sit with me. You're in the movie?”

“You're the only person I know here who maybe won't talk about the film or about me,” she explained as her eyes darted frenetically between the smattering of assembled students, looking for recognizable faces from which she could shrink.

“We don't have to talk about anything,” I answered with my still eyes on hers: twin hazel atoms, agitated, whizzing suspiciously around the room.

“Because we don't know each other, I mean.”

“I'm sorry?” I inquired, suddenly and strangely and intriguingly hurt.

“We don't really know each other, so we can talk about anything else. We can talk about the Giants, for example, because I don't know how you feel about them yet.”

“Right, I—”

“And you don't know how I feel about them either.”

“Right, so I don't really—”

“I hate them. I hate the Giants.”

“Alright. Do you mean the New York Giants, or—”

“So we shouldn't talk about that, probably, but what I'm saying is that we can basically talk about anything, just please not the film and not me. Not me in the film, I mean. Not acting.”

“Fiona, we don't have to talk about anything. It would actually be … rude, to talk, you know? We're at a movie, and everyone will be—”

“We're at a film, Leo,” she breathed, almost inaudibly, and in that moment I saw for the first time in my life a whole beautiful future.

I am not a sudden person, but something in her chased that all away. Stardust, maybe, though looking back it's difficult to say what parts of that were real. Even then, Fiona seemed infinitely more alive, and yet less lifelike, than the rest; she was ruled by other impulses, governed by other laws passed down from brighter bodies. And right then and there, in the gaping mouth of the campus theater, she snapped me from my present.

Within a week, it was decided that if we were going to be the perfect little love of the century we were going to have to do everything in double-time. And so it was: days of lunch and dinner, days of breakfast and lunch, afternoons spent hastily Venn diagramming our respective circles of friends, nights spent studying each other for the big quiz that seemed certain to come at the close of the academic year. If our nearest and dearest were shocked by the velocity of it all, Fiona and I neither noticed nor cared. Fast love was a business, and at graduation we took dozens of photographs together, correctly suspecting that our later selves would think us smart anticipators.

*   *   *

To those who don't know her well at all, Fiona is a dazzling cartoon mouse of a woman. Lithe and full-throated, perpetually bright-eyed and winging, she was impossible to miss, even at those times—and there were many—when she wanted nothing more than to be some icy and long-forgotten planet, rather than the gauzy, centric sun of every eager solar system she happened to flit through.

I learned this and everything else about her that summer and in the three following years. We moved into an apartment together on the first of September—I know, I know, but we did—four days before my first day of law school. The place was, by any metric, stark and sunless, but it provided untold gallons of renewable fuel for Fiona's acting machine; to her (she of the Great Midwest), it felt more like the Eastern Bloc than Brooklyn, a perspective that served to authenticate her entire artistic creaturehood. To me, the apartment brought to mind nothing more than striving, as of two young, squawking lovebirds barnstorming their way through life's challenges, shitting on the windshields of all who dared to question their liberal arts degrees. We were twenty-two when it started.

Becoming an adult is a funny thing in much the same sense that love is a funny thing, which is to say it usually isn't very funny at all. One minute we had been relics—quaint and crumbling New English artifacts quite simply as quaint and crumbling as the Old Man of the Mountain himself—and the next we were the sudden babies of New York City, reeling from the torrential overload of a fresh, strange world. All at once, Fiona and I had gone from feeling the oldest we had ever felt to feeling the youngest we had ever felt, and even though we were right the first time there was a sense that everything we'd done and seen to that point had been somehow prenatal.

The fear made us young, too: I was scared because I had acquired this whole array of adult skills—tandoori cooking, laundromat navigation, knowledge of gyms, relative expertise concerning the Buchanan presidency—but wasn't sure how to convincingly make a complete life out of them, and Fiona was scared because I explained this to her in exactly that way.

“What's it all going to be like?” she asked me with typical moon-eyed wonder, not thirty seconds after we opened our new apartment's thin door for the first time. The frame was splintered; the knob slumped loose from its mooring like a guilty dog.

“The whole thing?”

“Or any part. What will it be like for us?”

“I don't—I think we don't get to know. I think it's good that we don't get to know.”

“Yeah, but it's easy for you to say that because you're going to be a lawyer in three years. There are unknowns, but they're completely adorable, like ‘what prestigious internship am I going to get,' or ‘how well am I going to do on my torps exam?'”

“Torts.”

“Torps?”

“It's torts. You really thought—”

“I thought it was short for torpitude. Like crimes that are morally…”

“Turpitude.”

“Right. Okay, yes—turpitude. That one I should've had. Look, obviously I don't know what torps are, and I'm thrilled that you'll be learning about them, but my point is that your anticipated line of work comes with a certain degree of job security that mine does not.”

“Okay, well, absolutely, being a lawyer carries with it a lot less question marks than—”

“Fewer!”

“Nice. Yes. Fewer question marks, but the payoff of being an actress is a lot bigger.”

“How?”

“Well, for one thing, you'll be famous.”

“Ha!”

“You will. You're that good.”

And she was, she really was that good.

“Okay, but even a lot of phenomenally talented actors never break through,” she said wistfully, now lying perfectly still, face up, arms splayed, on the hardwood floor.

“You will. I already know that you'll become a star, Fiona. I know that with confidence. What are you doing? Are you making an apartment angel?”

It was hard, then, although that was almost certainly the point of the experience. When law school started, I became predictably overwhelmed by this whole rich and terrible world of ideas and rules, what an old professor once called “those wise restraints that make men free.” I dug into the work; it suited something in me, even if I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing there in the first place. My decision to apply to law school had been spurred by the same allergy to suddenness that Fiona later charmed away; why halt my education abruptly when there were so many graduate schools out there to help soften the fall? I had no particular career ambitions, but was frightened of closing doors, and among my several options the least narrow (and therefore most attractive) was the law.

The greatest thing I learned in law school was this, and here you'll want to maybe take notes, because I still find this to be just horribly interesting: if you move onto someone else's property, and if you can stay there long enough without being detected, under certain circumstances it will just
become yours
.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Fiona when she heard.

“I'm not kidding. Trespass somewhere for enough time, and eventually you own it.”

“That doesn't sound right to me. How is that a thing?”

“It's called adverse possession. It's been around since before America; it's a well-established thing.”

“Okay and what are the rules again?”

“Actual, continuous, open, notorious, hostile, and exclusive possession for a statutory period of—”

“English, counselor.”

“Well, you need to actually be present on the property, uh, continually, for however long the period of—”

“How long is that?”

“It varies by state, but in New York it's ten years.”

“And if you run out of toilet paper or Sriracha…”

“You can leave to go to the store. Continuous just means you can't leave for a long time and then come back. You'd have to start the ten years all over again.”

“Okay and what else?”

“Open and notorious means you can't actively hide from the owner or pretend you aren't actually squatting there; you need to change the land somehow, which could be by building something, like a fence, or a house—”

“A gazebo!”

“… Yep. A gazebo would definitely count. You need to be there without permission: that's hostile. The only other thing is exclusive. Exclusive means that the real owner can't be there while you're also there. Otherwise, you know.”