The Life of the World to Come (24 page)

“Hola,” said Lita at last.

“Hola, Lita,” I replied, adding the now requisite, “cómo estás?”

“Bien, bien,” she answered back with a far-away smile. She was nearing completion on what looked to be a superlatively warm sweater. “Y tú?” she ventured on after a moment. “Estás herido?” This was rapidly developing into our longest conversation ever, and the Spanish was already threatening to surpass my understanding.
Herido. Herido
.

“Sí,” I said, steering the discussion back into the safest harbor of my vocabulary. As a second act, I opted for, “uh, qué?” This seemed to amuse Lita, and she spoke now with sing-song deliberation.

“Te … lastimaste … a … ti … mismo?” she incanted, before slowly tapping a long needle against her knee.

“Mismo!” I exclaimed, idiotically. “Sí!” My face had been buried in the cushions of the couch, but I turned to her now in preparation for the coming explanatory effort. “Mismo is ‘hurt,' like ‘miserable.' And you're asking me if I'm hurt—no! You're asking me how I hurt myself. Well.” I gathered myself, and ventured on: “Yo … la tengo …
mismo
 … para … una … motorized baggage cart. Ooh! Aeropuerto. Airport. Yo la tengo mismo para una motorized baggage cart dans la aeropuerto. Sí?”

Lita looked me over sympathetically. She tapped her knee again with the needle, then pointed it at my crutches. Rafael Uribe Uribe had wandered back into the room, and it was difficult to say between the three of us who was most confused by the proceedings.

“Lay-knee,” she articulated carefully, “en qué trabajas?”

I had this one.
Trabajas
was work.

“Yo soy una,” I began, then faltered. What is a lawyer, anyway? “Yo soy una avocado?”

I didn't have the words to tell her what was wrong, or what I did, or what I'd seen. She nodded quietly, then began again to knit—content, it seemed, to let the conversation drown in the vast and spectacular sea of my linguistic ineptitude. It was a mercy killing.

*   *   *

I knew a guy back in high school who joined the Army right around the same time the rest of us were heading off to college; his name was Jack, and in my memory he is smart and good-natured. When I heard he was signing up to fight, I couldn't understand it; I hated that I couldn't understand it. How could a person be so willing to give up his life like that, and for what? His country? I felt strongly that I loved my country, but not with anything approaching the same fervor with which I loved being alive. Subjugating that love—subjugating your whole being—struck me as more than merely a gallant sacrifice. It seemed wasteful. A waste of your self, this individual who would not be making a repeat performance. There was a war then, and I know Jack went to fight in it, although I do not know what happened to him there.

Look: maybe I was a coward, and maybe that's the root of it. Maybe Jack knew something I did not about the purpose of our lives. I understood the appeal of heroism and the nobility of valor; I appreciated the supposed romance of war from reading Hemingway. And I admired Jack. But to give everything up? I was never willing to make that sort of sacrifice. For years, I felt awful for having this belief—then, as I got older, it became more difficult to tell the difference between being a soldier and being anything else. Though I never wanted to be anything other than alive, before long, I was subjugating my love to everything.

In Georgia, I piled my body onto the cause of abolition—a war by another name, albeit one which required no bravery whatsoever and which carried scant risk of a sudden death. Rachel thought briefly about throwing herself upon me, but we each recognized the quagmire that lay in store—hence our mutual retreat. Fiona enlisted in fantastical stardom; the casualties included her integrity and the home we'd built together. Emily and Boots surrendered themselves to each other, and forged a lasting peace. Everyone I knew was engaged in some hue of a conflict. We were all at war, even if no one died. But no: somebody died. Michael died.

I've never stopped picturing him as he was in the moment he slipped off of the Earth, and I never will. Candent flesh and utter stillness, his whole self limp, his parched lips home now to unbreakable silence, his eyes trapped forever under the ice of those two heavy lids. When I saw his body in that instant, I understood right away that he would not be back again, not ever, and that all the possibilities we'd opened ourselves up to were false avenues—there was only one future, not infinite but finite, and our trajectory is a single unbending line from light to ash. Michael was gone.

Michael was gone, and Fiona was gone too. Not her body, of course—I could see it still on television whenever I wanted—but the spirit had fled from her. I guess everybody goes after a while. When we die; when we give up what we love. When we let the future become the past, or when we make it so (not with ruthless time but with our own cold wants). And that's just the thing: I can't imagine wanting anything other than to be here forever, even sad, even alone, even after everyone else had gone. I'd gladly be the last one at the party, remembering the party; I'd stay to see them turn off the lights, and even after that, I'd stay.

My favorite poem is “This Solitude of Cataracts,” by Wallace Stevens. Fiona read it to me one night not long after we first moved in together; I was hardly listening until I heard her say this: “He wanted to feel the same way over and over.” It captured me, this thought, and the poem ends with its narrator desiring nothing more than, among all things, timelessness: that the record might skip on and on forever, petrifying his senses, abolishing “the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,” leaving this bronze man free—simply, sempiternally—just to breathe “his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.”

When I saw her for the very first time at that awful party, and flailed and failed to dance alongside her fluid form; when we sat together in the self-lit campus theater; when we adversely possessed the whole of the Earth from crusty owners who could never understand our ways; when I lay with her on a hospital bed, and we hatched a plan to find each other long after the world went dark; when each moment made its momentary promise to put an end to the tyrannical regime of calendar and clock—I wanted to feel the same way over and over.

She snatched that feeling away from me, yes she did. She unspooled all of it: future, present, past, all into this jumble I've got now. She took my precious time, and I won't forgive her for that.

In interviews, her voice is different now from the one I know—it's stripped of lilt and quirk, and that slight Wisconsin accent has given way to a universal normalcy. On screen, her body flows in a different way than it once did: more calculated, less burdened. Every place I see her, she is changed, her wonders compromised, her nature tamed, her vulnerabilities scrubbed clean. Her heart—I don't know her heart. Maybe it's this, and maybe this was the problem:

Fiona's heart was a doe: slight, pretty, and fleeting. Fast as hell. You can't approach or it goes.

My heart was a buffalo: old and slow, grotesque and noble in equal measure, and for a long while I was certain that she had used every part of it.

*   *   *

“When I ask you to do these stretches at home, it isn't a suggestion,” Jane Dailey scolded me ten minutes into my second therapy session. I was flat on my back, staring up at a patternless array of ceiling tiles, with my twisted knee raised high in her insistent hands. Every fifteen seconds, she plied that knee into a previously uncharted pose, giving little if any credence to basic ideas about which way legs should bend, or to this particular leg's long, proud history of inertia. She was right, too: I hadn't been doing my stretches.

Jane had a calm demeanor and a curious habit—she never made eye contact when we spoke. Normally, I'd expect myself to mirror this behavior: all my life, I've involuntarily taken on the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of those around me. I slip slightly into the accent of whomever I am speaking with, temporarily abscond with the minor limp of the man I just passed on the street, even mimic the mood of my waitress. My body is an easy host, and yet it could not bring itself to accommodate Jane's aversion. The more she looked away, the more intently I looked at her.

“Jesus, you're stiff,” she said, still manipulating my hopeless limb. “I take it you're not a runner?”

“I'm a lawyer,” I answered.

“You can be both,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Injuries like this one are easier to prevent and recover from if you regularly take the time to stretch, and, you know … exercise, from time to time.”

“I play basketball, on occasion,” I told her defensively, and technically this was true. But only technically.

“Okay,” she said. After several rounds of silence, she added, “I wasn't saying that you're out of shape or anything. I just meant—”

“No, I didn't think—”

“Because I'm just talking about flexibility.”

“I get it,” I said, still trying to meet her eyes, which remained indelibly fixed on my knees. “So you don't think I'm fat, then?”

“Of course not. You're the dictionary definition of lanky. I just meant you could benefit a lot from increased movement. You'd heal a lot faster.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” I said, “for next time.”

She went on examining me, and I her, for another ten minutes. She prodded; I stared. The both of us were thorough. My preliminary diagnosis was that Jane was studious and dry—she had a level way about her that came out in crisp, unadorned movements and a relentlessly deadpan tone. She spoke calmly and with purpose. She was, as far as I could tell, a top-notch physical therapist. But she was warm in spite of what appeared to be a mostly serious demeanor.

Not warm like Fiona, who was warm like a match: i.e., not warm at all unless you were so close as to be set on fire, at which point she was as warm as one person can be to another, at which point she went out. Not even warm like Rachel, who was warm like a blanket: i.e., statically and steadily generous with herself. No, Jane was warm like alcohol: i.e., working from the inside.

She prodded; I stared, and, as I recall, this went on for a very long time.

*   *   *

It was 4:45 in the morning on a summer night—I can't remember the year—when a call came in from a number I did not recognize; I was in bed, and Rafael Uribe Uribe was too.

“Hello?” I said, and was met by labored breaths, a pronounced gulp, and words whispered so softly as to render their authorship undetectable: “It's really you.”

“Who's calling please?” I asked, and my heart became a sudden rock, my arteries a petrified forest, my throat seized up with eremic want, my hands grew numb, and my face hot, because the moment I asked, I knew.

“It's me, Leo,” the whisper revealed. “It's Fiona.”

It had been a long, long time since I'd heard her voice, and in my life I would never hear it again—not off-screen, not like this. I rose, and walked in silence to the window. Rafi paced hurriedly away from the room, because dogs know. I wasn't certain what to say. What was there even to say?

“It's 4:45,” I enunciated blankly into the phone, sounding, I thought then, like one of those old time and temp recordings. “In the morning.” A long few seconds passed by.

“Well, it's only 1:45 where I am,” she said, whispering weakly still. I thought that maybe she was drunk.

“In California,” I clarified. She might as well have been in outer space; it might as well have been any time at all.

“Yeah,” she sighed, “in California.” Another half minute elapsed without words.

“Why are you calling?” I asked at last, but I didn't even know if I wanted to know the answer, if there was one. Three thousand miles away and three hours behind me, she began to cry audibly.

“I don't know,” she heaved, keeping her heavy sobs low. “I don't know, Leo. I just wanted
—ha-pfffffffft
—sorry; I blew my nose. I just wanted to hear you I thi-hi-hink.
”

“I didn't even know you were still out there,” I said calmly, but the calm came from shock and not from steely nerves.

She hiccupped, and let go of other wet sounds.

“What do you me-he-hean?”

“I mean, I've seen you on television,” I replied, trying my damnedest to sound, I don't know, aloof, or at a minimum steady. “I know that you exist still, or some version of you, I guess. I know that you're definitely still alive. But it doesn't really seem like you anymore—you look very staged, out there, not at all how I remember. What happened to you, Fiona? I mean, Jesus, what the hell happened? Can it really be true? Did you really become all the things you always—and so fast—what happened? Why are you calling, Fiona? I'm really asking. What is it that you want?”

And though I wasn't trying to upset her, this made her cry openly for five whole minutes. No words were exchanged; I gave her time to even out. When she spoke again, she was nearly calm. She said:

“There is something I wanted to ask you. I know you don't owe me anything anymore, but is it alright if I just ask you this one thing, because I feel like I really need some help right now?”

“Sure, Fiona,” I said. “What is it? Go ahead and ask.”

“Was I a good girlfriend?” is the thing she asked.

“Heh,” I ejected, reflexively. It took me a moment to: “Wait, is that a serious—no!”

“I wasn't?”

“Fiona, are you being serious? No! Of course not.”

I felt it all rising up inside of me, all at once: every bit of that poison I'd stored away.

“Why?” she asked, her voice leveled, every trace of her tears washed clear.

“I can't tell if you're being serious.”

“I am.”